Casting dots upon the waters...., which hopefully can be connected up into a coherent outline
quoth DW;
Can you offer your analysis of racial issues in Mexico, cnulan? At least superficially, massive mixing doesn't seem to have solved anything.
How about India? Same general dynamic as Mexico.
If by "same general dynamic" you mean historically that the Aryans conquered and did with the pre-existing Children of God {harijans} much the same as the Spaniards did with the pre-existing Children of God {indios} - ok - there are actually intensely striking parallels - some of which carry through to the modern era.
That trouble in Chiapas is of course a racially demarcated culture/governance war. Funny how little attention that situation now garners in our media...,
I formerly did binnis in Mexico City and Juarez. I currently do Binnis in Bangalore. My stature, complexion, features, and bald-head don't set off any unconscious triggers with any of my counterparts in either locale. This is also true in KCK and on the West Side of KC, longstanding, traditional Mexican hoods where I have never, ever had a moment's interpersonal hiccup, at all.
So, as a practical matter, race-mixing has obviated the issue for me, at least in those specific contexts.
The Golden Age of the Moor edited by Ivan Van Sertima provides a wealth of evidence concerning the extension of Africa up through the Pyranees for centuries. Islam drove massive intermarriage and race-mixing. Almost, one is inclined to think, to the point of making it a conscious and intentional aspect of Islamic governance. In any event, links to relevant articles can be found here. My review of Rashidi's exceedingly generous web dispensation doesn't show any articles that go into the specific depth of some of the chapters of this book, so I may have to transcribe some pages for emphasis. If I get about a half/hour later on, I'll try to do the transcription, no promises, as I've got to go to a meeting of uncertain duration right now.
In any event, so you know where I'm headed with this, in case you're inclined to throw in on this theme, I believe that the Spanish and even more profoundly the Portuguese cultures are cultural and racial melanges. Nowhere is the result of centuries of race mixing more evident than in Brazil and Venezuela - the latter of which has a black and indian popularly elected president who's presently giving American conservatives fits.
So, as a practical matter, race-mixing has obviated the issue for me, at least in those specific contexts.
In both Mexico and India, light skin color translates into unearned privilege. That's the "same general dynamic" I referenced. That seemed evidence that mixing wasn't in and of itself a real solution.
That's not to say that dark skinned people in those countries face the issues of black Americans.
So maybe I over-stated the negativity as an analog to a future after massive mixing.
Historically (over 100k years), the only long lived barriers to mixing have been geographic. Religious and cultural ones came and then went. If life survives, we can predict with near certainty that the people who inhabit North America in the year 3000 will have mixed and mixed a whole lot.
"Islam drove massive intermarriage and race-mixing."
Let's not forget that Islam also drove the African slave trade, and still does in many "Muslim" nations. That Arabs in particular were major contributors to the evolution and advancement of antiblack racism is indisputable. Consult the ethnological discourses produced by Arab scholars during the "Golden Age of the Moors" and you find primer after primer on antiblack racism. Not even "black" Muslims were spared this racial animus, as they are not spared today in Darfur in the Sudan.
Moreover, we should not for a moment believe that "race-mixing" has somehow mitigated antiblack racism. To the contrary, in countries like Brazil and India it created intricate caste systems that are in most cases grounded in "color consciousness." Brazil and India, in particular, follow racist traditions and social practices that surpass apartheid in the dehumanization and brutalization of millions of their citizens.
We also are talking about the mixing of haplotypes or clines not races. Biological race is a fiction.
We also are talking about the mixing of haplotypes or clines not races. Biological race is a fiction.
an objective but not a psychological given...,
Let's not forget that Islam also drove the African slave trade, and still does in many "Muslim" nations. That Arabs in particular
which is it O, Islam? or Arabs? seems to me that a significant distinction ought be drawn here. What I'm interested in getting at are the immiscible psychological crunchy bits that are subliminally maintained and exploited to control kinship, politics, and economics.
Islamic practice was constructed so as to undermine those particular crunchy bits. Along with the coincidence of strategic resources underlying Muslim population concentrations, I suspect that that's one of the primary reasons that it has been targetted in these here contemporary culture wars. Despite significant failings, Islam has proven its mettle across centuries in ways that no variant of Marxism ever could.
My core thesis is that nothing in the land of the free and the home of the brave is comparably architected to undermine tribal or kinship crunchy bits - save possibly the U.S. Armed Forces. At the end of the day, one of the core political polarities I want to examine is that which pits intentional and inadvertent practitioners of human husbandry against intentional and inadvertant practitioners of laissez faire miscegenation.
We also are talking about the mixing of haplotypes
Nicely done O. I thank you for the careful and intentional choice of terms, in so doing, you've already pointed out the way for any interested other to redefine their mapping of the problem space.
Racism is embedded in the infrastructure and superstructure of this society. It doesn't require some kind of Mendelian mechanism or Freudian analysis to account for its etiology or pathological manifestations. It ain't about parenting. It's about power and privilege. It's about the institutionalization of that power and privilege. That's how it spans generations. It is not embodied in individuals. It is the ethos of a collective. It's a cultural system and the ideology upon which it is based and around which the integrity and coherence of that cultural system is defined, achieved and maintained.
What is G-Dub?
Sometimes O, your righteous indignation appears to cloud your objective discernment..,
The physician-sponsored anti-midwife campaign condemned midwives as "dirty" 28 and "a relic of barbarism."29 Midwife use was common among blacks and former slaves and the campaign played on racial prejudice referring to midwives as "filthy and ignorant and not far removed from the jungles of Africa."30 The physicians also preyed upon the public’s bias against the European immigrants and the growing fear of communism in proclaiming midwives "un-American."31
Pursuant to pharmacological and occult interests of my own, I helped a young woman research and prepare her graduate thesis at Harvard on the politics of the Inquisition. So I'm not coming to this from a purely coincidental angle of approach. First, it was a largely secular campaign of terrorism, second it was aided and abetted by the secret society(s) comprising barber-surgeon guild(s), third, you don't really believe that the imagery of the black man of the forest, or the two-horned god is accidental? Do you?
I have no objection to the one-sided presentation given here O. I believe quite a number of interesting questions are begged, but I believe the map of Islam does not identically coincide with the map of the Arab world.
why does the Arab world have no corresponding Black population as is found in the New World? Lewis provides an answer, 'One reason is obviously the high population of eunuchs among Black males entering the Islamic lands.
Notice this author also uses Arabic and Islamic interchangeably...,
I haven't forgotten transcription of intermarriage in the furtherance of Moorish interpenetration of southern Europe..,
Knowing a bit about the occulted history of seignurial practices in Europe, the contemporary spectral light of collective anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.K., American white flight, Brown v. Board, war on drugs, war on terra, black male criminalization, the so-called enemy within, and Bennett's lip slip - all seem like conservative embodiments pointing in a definite direction to me.
Next links will deal with the expulsions and the role of the so-called Inquisition in the same. The important fact to realize is that the Inquisition was a secular seignurial enterprise and not the Catholic Dominican just-so-story that's conventionally told and popularly believed.
That's just the way my *free* associations work...,
"why does the Arab world have no corresponding Black population as is found in the New World? Lewis provides an answer, 'One reason is obviously the high population of eunuchs among Black males entering the Islamic lands."
Lewis is the master of the understatement: " the high population of eunuchs among Black males entering the Islamic lands". Sounds like those pesky black males stood at the borders and castrated themselves before immigrating.
Castration certainly is a factor, but other forces were at work. The brutally short life expectancy of black slaves in the Arab world is something Segal mentions briefly in "Islam's Black Slaves," and is also addressed by Manning in his demographic studies of the slave trade.
Concubinage and intermarriage clearly were factors in the assimilation of "others" into the Arab populations. While Arabs were castrating black males to make them house servants and harem guards, they were having children with black females.
"I have no objection to the one-sided presentation given here O. I believe quite a number of interesting questions are begged, but I believe the map of Islam does not identically coincide with the map of the Arab world."
I was unaware of the site linked above. I'll check it out when I get the chance.
I realize "the map of Islam does not coincide" with the Arab world, geographically speaking. But Islam remains very much imbued with its Arab heritage. Praying to Mecca serves as a method to maintain Arab primacy if not hegemony. And, of course, Arabic is the language of the Holy Qu'ran.
"Islamic practice was constructed so as to undermine those particular crunchy bits. Along with the coincidence of strategic resources underlying Muslim population concentrations, I suspect that that's one of the primary reasons that it has been targetted in these here contemporary culture wars."
Granted, "strategic resources" comprise an obvious justification for the current war between the monotheists (Jews, Christians, Muslims), but the conflict, as you know, is deeply rooted in the history of Jihad. Consider this excerpt from French historian Paul Fregosi's book, "Jihad," on the profound impact of Islam on Europe:
A large part of Europe was taken, occupied for centuries, sometimes devastated, and some of it was Islamized. Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Sicily, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Rumania, Wallachia, Albania, Moldavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Armenia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine, and eastern and southern Russia were all Jihad battlefields where Islam conquered or was conquered. Many of those lands were occupied by the Muslims, in some cases by Arabs and Moors, in others by the Ottoman Turks, usually for hundreds of years: Spain 800 years, Portugal 600 years, Greece 500 years, Sicily 300 years, Serbia 400 years, Bulgaria 500 years, Rumania 400 years, and Hungary 150 years. Hungary, particularly, was ruined, plundered and ravaged and took 200 years to recover from Muslim occupation. By comparison, the European occupation of the Muslim countries of the Near and Middle East and of North Africa lasted less than a century and a half. In some countries of Europe, Spain, Sicily, Bosnia, Albania, Macedonia, the Crimea, and Crete, many, sometimes most of the people gave up Christianity for Islam; but in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq, few indeed were the adherents of the Muslim faith who gave up Islam for Christianity (23-24).
The war is deeply rooted in something. It's radical as hell. Radical as the Inquisition with its serial genital mutilations, radical as lynchings with more of the same, radical as Abu Ghraib and the topical consideration of torture vs. terror underway in the House and Senate.
Remember a couple months ago when it was shown beyond any doubt that suicide bombings coincide with territorial invasion and occupation and have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam? I began thinking to myself then and there that the underlying motives for the culture war might run deeper than resource appropriation, though that's definitely a priority setting consideration.
Thinking about Bulworth vs. Lyedecker is what really focused this for me though. When primates in particular and mammalian vertebrates more generally square off for intraspecific conflict, it's usually over mating rights or in our post hoc people of the word terminology, "our way of life".
Then I think to myself, hmmm..., our? what means our in the context of America in which we don't enjoy the same prerogatives and access as certain other folk? Our territorial and other economic prerogatives are severly constrained, and until quite recently were held in check by the force of law.
We always talk about civil rights, but isn't it really only a modest gradation on the dial to switch so-called civil to seignurial? I mean after all, as a matter of fact, there is no equal rights amendment? Abortion or the woman's right to choose is hardly a settled matter? In a very real sense, full-citizen personhood has not been fully bestowed on well more than half the U.S. population. In a haplotypical sense, it wouldn't be an entirely unfounded stretch to talk about women in our so-called free society as embodying the characteristics of property as much as personhood under the law, and of course it goes without saying where we stood not so very long ago.
I'm not trying to be inflammatory, I'm just looking at what is codified into American law in a slightly atypical manner. Obviously, Islam comes to terms with these same issues in a strikingly different manner.
Men were also drawn to the Nation of Islam because of the emphasis placed on male leadership. African-American churches tend to be dominated by women, with one central male figure, the pastor in the pulpit. As a result, many men do not feel affirmed in the church environment. They see the pastor as a threat and even a rival. Elijah Muhammad was able to criticize the Black male while affirming his role. Thus he challenged men to take the lead, and they responded. 'Unlike the typical Christian church, the Muslim temples attract many more men than women, and men assume the full management of temple affairs. Women are honored and they perform important functions within a defined role.'(7)
The role of women consists of teaching other women and managing the affairs of the home. Ironically, women were also attracted to the Nation of Islam because they appreciated the strength of the men and the protective posture they took towards Black women. As C. Eric Lincoln noted in his research, the Nation of Islam appeals to the young regardless of gender.
and no matter how liberally strenuous the presentation seems, some eugenic evidence belies all competing claims
The rules of Islam mirror those of Judaism, but in reverse. A Muslim man may marry a non-Muslim, though only if she's Jewish or Christian (they are considered "people of the book"). A Muslim woman may under no circumstances marry a non-Muslim. Even in America, according to Haddad, women who break the rules are likely to be cut off entirely by their families and mosques.
it's not simple, but 1.1 Billion Muslims demonstrates that Islamic seignurialism is very highly effective...,
points touched upon in the first article go to the psycho-social root of the American dilemma;
The edict at Bob Jones, on the other hand, was aimed at the preservation of a race. A white person was not allowed to date a black person. There was no conversion option. It didn't matter whether both were Baptists or one was Bahai and one was Hindu.
My contention is that the policy at Bob Jones, the policy among the LDS folk in Utah, and numerous other such policies - both written and unwritten - have been the irrational crux of the American seignurial paradigm.
I've gotta get to some evidence underscoring the motives and methods of the expulsions. I've also got to touch on the permanent mark made by africanity on Europe that is still most vitally expressed in Brazil. Sheila Walker's classic article goes to the heart of how seignurial Africa had its way with Lashbuna...,
"it's not simple, but 1.1 Billion Muslims demonstrates that Islamic seignurialism is very highly effective...,"
Part of the complexity of the issue goes to the manner in which "Islamic seignurialism" instantiated itself. Given the options of conversion versus death or slavery, many of those who faced Jihad chose the former. The history of resistance to Islamic conquest, particularly in North Africa, has not been adequately documented or disseminated. Would you care to comment on movements that resist seignurialism, Islam's, the Inquisitions', or others? I be interested in your connecting dots ....
Would you care to comment on movements that resist seignurialism, Islam's, the Inquisitions', or others? I be interested in your connecting dots ....
Thank you for hanging in there with me on this O. My parameters are admittedly a little expansive. My opinion of the histories with which I'm familiar leads me to believe that Moorish Islamic seignurialism has shown itself far and away the most civilized and tolerant of diversity. One need only consider the religious and academic freedom enjoyed in Spain under centuries of Moorish rule to see the truth of this assertion. Very obviously, the course of Western his-story and ourstory was fundamentally impacted by the visigothic explusion of Moors from southern europe.
This level of tolerance was rather obviously not the case throughout the entire Islamic world. This of course points us under the hood of a unitive Islam and directly toward the underlying tribal and cultural underpinnings of any given local Islamic flourishment.
I'm also not a western anti-Christian. As far as the Inquisition goes, it would be wrong to put that pogromme at the Catholic church's doorstep. Careful evaluation of documentary evidence - contrary to the popularly held mythology of the Inquisition - shows that it was a secular feudal movement. Of particular interest to me is the expulsion of jews and the moors from Spain, and the genocide enacted against the Cathars in southern france.
The U.S. is - in certain regards - a revolution against the European feudal order. However, the founding fathers who got themselves out from under one gangsterish boot, didn't hesitate to re-enact that same type of seignurial oppression on us - as the plantation was little different for us than the baronial fiefdom had been for them.
Coming ahead to today, it seems to me that black men in America are faced with some very interesting political choices in the years ahead. As you might imagine, I'm keenly interested in hearing what the honorable brother minister will have to say next week when he gets his national audience for a minute on C-SPAN. America for its part is keenly interested in the black political temperature because it realizes that it's now gotten itself into a death match on multiple simultaneous fronts.
Connecting up the dots. I believe the western way of life is fraught with insurmountable thermodynamic structural defects. Consequently, I believe opportunities exist to drive alternative social constructions. I am far more interested in black technocratic introspection and collaboration on the issues central to local thriving and flourishment. I deeply trust that we embody a Moorish civilizing ethos.
I do not believe it possible that the mainstream western way of life can prevail in the world war on which it is embarked. I personally have little doubt that it has reached the end of its cycle.
Politically, I believe much depends on how able America proves itself to be in shifting from an authoritarian to a libertarian mode of governance and conduct. If the former prevails, there's going to be hell up in harlem. If the latter, then all manner of possibilities unfold.
As things are now, I can't see my way clear to getting with the conservative program because I don't think full participatory kinship has been extended to me in this country by these people. If I go to a movie and see Denzel, or Will Smith representing with Cameron Diaz like Billy Bob Thornton did with Halle Berry - then I'd be more inclined to believe the lip service routinely paid - but seldom ever enacted - to a colorblind society.
We got tricked in the old west, in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam into fighting for a way of life in which we are not full participants. Now that you know the level at which I view full participatory standing, and the way in which this culture militates against our free expression of the fundamental Maslowian impulse - along quite definite color lines - I don't see allowing my son to wind up as a conscript in this other man's army. Should things change, and necessity is the mother of radical change, then perhaps I'll soften my view.
Bennett is not alone in dreaming about dead black babies. Whether the thought is spoken aloud or not, the American fantasy is a world without any black people in it.
Bennett is not alone in dreaming about dead black babies. Whether the thought is spoken aloud or not, the American fantasy is a world without any black people in it.
What do you hope to achieve posting stuff like that cnulan?
What do you hope to achieve posting stuff like that cnulan?
explanatory objectivity...,
Your solipsism is showing through again DW. Do you really believe that the associations I'm exploring would alienate the majority of blacks, humans? Or are you only speaking self-referentially as the representative of a specific segment of white Americans who act one way, but explain their actions in an orthogonal other way?
It is my anecdotally, analytically, and liminally stated view that the roots of American racism are unavailable to rational and rhetorical intervention. In the course of this thread, I've outlined an atypical frame of reference that goes to motivations outside the threshold of political correctness.
Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to demonstrate the factual or interpretive error inhering to this assemblage. Perhaps you can outline an alternative motivational framework that will provide a more onto accounting of American racist behaviour, with particular emphasis on the past 30 odd years in which white self-segregation, public school integration (busing wars), the so-called War on Drugs, the ongoing War on Terra, and now recently, the unintended Freudian self-disclosure made by a leading conservative moralist. I could probably spin it up like Samad did as an ideological difference, but I suspect that these ideological blinds conceal an underlying practical motivation having nothing to do with the conventional political just-so-stories.
Bennett clearly believes that black people are born criminals. His statement explains many things about his history. Bennett spent years warning about teenage “super predators� when the juvenile crime rate dropped. He continues to advocate for harsh sentences for drug crimes when rates of drug use have also dropped.
If you care to apply the lens of your ennobling behavioural interpretations to what I have outlined as a series of dots, then by all means, have at it.
I would love to see your interpretation of european seignurial imperatives. I would love to see your interpretation of the peculiar excesses of the Inquisition, Lynchings, and Abu Ghraib. I would love to see how you interpret the Culture War, the War on Drugs, War on Terra, and the media's imagistic War on Blackness - as all of the above emanate from a single ideological nexus.
If you can reconcile the rhetoric with the behaviours in a way that is more elegant and internally consistent, then I am your eager student.
You have to understand. DW doesn't want to address any existing problems...pointing out existing problems is seeking isolation because no one wants to hear it.
"My opinion of the histories with which I'm familiar leads me to believe that Moorish Islamic seignurialism has shown itself far and away the most civilized and tolerant of diversity."
While what you say is no doubt true (especially when you compare Moorish Spain to its European neighbors), I think the degree of “tolerance” practiced there is highly overstated. Granted, the Moors in Spain developed an oasis of advanced learning in their Andalusian enclave, and they seemed somewhat accepting of "others" (especially Jewish scholars) in their presence, but the society they created was riven with divisions, secular and religious, and eventually came under the rule of Islamic fundamentalists (the Almoravid and Almohades dynasties) who could and perhaps do serve as models for today's jihadists.
Many black scholars (past and present) have succumbed to the tendency to idealize and romanticize the Moors (this is generally not the case with Van Sertima and “Golden Age of the Moors”). Earlier treatments of the subject by Du Bois, J.A. Rogers, de-Graft Johnson, and John G. Jackson, were produced with a decidedly vindicationist agenda in mind. While their scholarship was by no means faulty or flawed, they were in the unenviable position of having to both define and defend the humanity of black people every time they put words to paper. Their intention of correcting the omissions of Western history and of setting the record straight about African cultural and intellectual achievements, while commendable and necessary, nevertheless, generally failed to situate Moorish culture within the larger context of Arabic hegemony and its promotion and expansion of color prejudice and racial slavery. Those scholars and their groundbreaking studies, however, laid the foundations for Van Sertima’s compilation.
Two recent books by Menocal and Rubenstein continue this theme of tolerance. Menocal’s “Ornament of the World” (2002) and Rubenstein’s “Aristotle’s Children” (2003) both seek to present a more contemporary analysis of how everybody in Moorish Spain “got along” Rodney King style. The sub-title of Menocal’s book--“How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain” (italics added)--stretches the point to the absurd. Tolerance, according to my Random House Dictionary, denotes “a fair, objective, and permissible attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one’s own. Despite the possibility of some confusion on this point, tolerance does not connote or imply acceptance. Underlying the concept of “culture” is the notion that it consists of commonly “accepted” and agreed upon beliefs and behaviors. From this perspective, Menocal really seems to be referring to the pragmatic and expedient manner in which Jews, Muslims and Christians grudgingly cooperated with each other to advance their own cultural causes rather than a common cultural cause or identity. Charles J. Halperin, in an essay titled, The Ideology of Silence: Prejudice and Pragmatism on the Medieval Frontier (1984) contends:
The demands of religious prejudice prevented the formulation or articulation of any medieval theories genuinely equivalent to modern concepts of peaceful coexistence or detent. One might admire, intermarry with, trade with, even borrow intellectual skills from the infidel, but never concede the legitimacy of his religion. To admit the legitimacy of the religion of the enemy would have automatically called into question the insistence upon the exclusive religious superiority of one’s own. Since religion subsumed under it one’s conception of the political and social order—one’s way of life—such ideological tolerance would have undermined the social, political, and cultural foundations of one’s own society and polity. For this reason, exchange at the intellectual level, inextricably tied to religion, became even more difficult to achieve (465-466).
For Menocal, tolerance means these hostile religious groups were able to find, through a process of “unconscious acceptance,” some “positive” or “productive” mechanism for dealing with internal and external contradictions to their belief systems and behaviors. But such “positive” outcomes, as Menocal describes them, again point to a kind of pragmatism based on “self” rather than “mutual” interest. Here is how Menocal iterates the function and products of this Andalusian “culture of tolerance:
It was there that the profoundly Arabized Jews rediscovered and reinvented Hebrew; there that Christians embraced nearly every aspect of Arabic style—from the intellectual style of philosophy to the architectural styles of mosques—not only while living in Islamic dominions but especially after wresting political control from them; there that men of unshakable faith, like Abelard and Maimonides and Averroes, saw no contradiction in pursuing the truth, whether philosophical or scientific or religious, across confessional lines. This vision of a culture of tolerance recognized that the incongruity in the shaping of individuals as well as their cultures was enriching and productive. It was an approach to life and its artistic and intellectual and even religious pursuits that was contested by many—as it is today—and violently so at times—as it is today—and yet powerful and shaping nevertheless, for hundreds of years (2002:11-12).
Ironically, Maimonides’ pursuit of “the truth” led to his conclusion that genocide was an acceptable means to prevent the spread of false doctrines advocated by Muslims. Maimonides and his fellow Iberian intellectuals may have pursued and found truth “across confessional lines,” as Menocal claims, but such truths only became valid within the strictures and dogmas of their own religious ideologies.
Lastly, I should point out that slavery and color prejudice were tolerated in Moorish Spain. Brunson and Rashidi also make this point in their essay published in the “Golden Age of the Moors.”
Since this post has gone on long enough, I will use the next one to float a few dots of my own...
Concubinage and intermarriage clearly were factors in the assimilation of "others" into the Arab populations. While Arabs were castrating black males to make them house servants and harem guards, they were having children with black females.
now I'm not saying that this is an exact description of the broad American seignurial modus operandi, and I'm not saying that the American MO is completely impermeable - the generative impulse can reverse override cultural permission settings from time to time in outlier areas. however...., even there, these permissions are still set exceedingly tight.
The kernal of American haplotypic power (kinship) - on the other hand - is completely locked down and black men are completely denied access at that level of the system.
Muslim colonization of Europe and Europe’s exposure to Islamic culture created the conditions for the acquisition and development of the ideology and technology that made European global conquest possible after the fifteenth century. The wars with Islam, religious and military, functioned as a catalyst in fostering a kind of European social consciousness and solidarity specifically organized around Manichaeanistic notions of “self” and “other.” Enrique Dussel, in his analysis of the formation of modernity, makes the following useful observation:
The Iberian Reconquest, with the extreme sectarian violence it unleashed in its final stages (broken treaties, elimination of local elites, endless massacres and tortures, the demand that the conquered betray their religion and culture under pain of death or expulsion, the confiscation and repatriation in feudal form of lands, towns and their inhabitants to the officers of the conquering army), was, in turn, the model for the colonization of the New World.
The European “self” in its confrontation with the non-European “other” conceived and constructed its concept of difference from the monotheistic dichotomy of believer/non-believer and the binary terms of Manichaean oppositions. The “black” presence in Iberia as Muslim conquerors and non-Muslim slaves inspired and influenced the transfer of the color code of the Manichaean allegory from the theological realm of the symbolic and abstract to the existential identity of certain human groups. The “black” color-coding of infidels and pagans and their “demonization” furnished a basis for later European scholars to speculate and conclude that the differences between Europeans and “others” were not merely ideological but innately and immutably biological.
Moses Maimonides, the influential medieval Jewish scholar—who was born in Cordova in 1135 and who later fled to Cairo to avoid persecution—wrote an important text that merged Aristotelian philosophy with Jewish theology in presenting his analysis and interpretation of Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures. The Guide for the Perplexed, a major philosophical treatise of the twelfth century, included an argument for endogamy as a barrier against idolatry (in Maimonides’ view intermarriage with non-Jews posed a threat to the strict observation of Jewish laws and traditions). In constructing his argument for “good lineage” Maimonides defended the legitimacy of Hebrew genealogy in the Torah and demonstrated how it served to establish and preserve Jewish identity and integrity. The following passages taken from an allegory he devised to demonstrate the relationship between faith and reason illustrates how the essential intellectual components of racial ideology assumed a prototypic form in the late Middle Ages. Maimonides argues that: “the extreme Turks that wander about the north, the Kushites who live in the south, and those who are like these” exemplify groups who are without religion altogether and therefore without reason. He goes on to make this critical observation: “I consider these as irrational beings, and not as human beings; they are below mankind, but above the monkeys, since they have the form and shape of man, a mental faculty above that of the monkey.” With this preamble Maimonides makes the following assertions concerning Muslims and the descendants of Ham, whom he believes hold false doctrines: “They are worse than the first class [Turks and Kushites], and under certain circumstances it may be necessary to slay them, and to extirpate their doctrines, in order that others should not be misled” The late Ivan Hannaford believed that Maimonides statement marked “the first time in Western thought people are described as beyond the bounds of rationality; they are not human. Others, rational but lacking in faith, are perceived as so dangerous to the position of the rational that their extirpation from the face of the earth is justified.”
Maimonides’ views are echoed five centuries later when Enlightenment-era European scholars, reifying the abstract notion of “rationality” as one of the distinctive traits of European character and civilization, set about the peculiar business of establishing the tenets of scientific racism. One need only consult the works of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) John Locke (1632-1704), Voltaire (1694-1778), and Montesquieu (1689-1765), among others, for salient examples of how such ideas developed and were expressed during the height of Europe’s global conquest. The following illustrative passage from the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) appeared in his essay: Of National Characters (1753):
I am apt to suspect the Negroes and in general all the other species of man (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent in either action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences…. In Jamaica indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but ‘tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.
Hume’s sentiments were grounded in ideas about “black” people that developed from medieval precursors and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In exercises in sophistry perhaps unparalleled in history, Europeans subjugated and degraded “blacks” through their systems of forced servitude and then pointed to their degradation as justification for their enslavement. Frederick Douglass, in a typically eloquent passage, exposes this discursive tactic of white supremacists that is known in today’s parlance as “blaming the victim:”
The evils most fostered by slavery and oppression, are precisely those which slaveholders and oppressors would transfer from their system to the inherent character of their victims. Thus the very crimes of slavery become slavery’s best defense. By making the slave a character fit only for slavery, they excuse themselves for making the slave a free man. A wholesale method of accomplishing this result is to overthrow the instinctive consciousness of the common brotherhood of man.
Despite its social and religious turmoil, the Iberian Peninsula was perhaps the greatest intellectual center of the late medieval world. Within its complex intellectual systems it also comprised a think tank and training ground for the invention of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the European colonial systems that administered it, and the religious and proto-racist ideology that justified and sustained it. However, as Enrique Dussel points out, the Americas involuntarily served as the geo-social laboratory where such theories took the form of practical experiments in genocide, forced migration, and forced servitude based on color. War-torn Iberia also played a decisive role in the social construction of “black” and “white” identity. James H. Sweet notes: “In Iberia, once the traits of the infidel and the slave became associated with blackness, race became the driving force in the formation of Spanish and Portuguese attitudes toward sub-Saharan Africans.”
These are a few of my dots for this discussion. They also connect back to earlier dots of yours that addressed inter-marriage. Had to cut it short. Gotta run.
"The kernal of American haplotypic power (kinship) - on the other hand - is completely locked down and black men are completely denied access at that level of the system."
Is the kernal the seed or sperm, the ultimate seignurialsign, reified and codified in the one drop rule?
Is the kernal the seed or sperm, the ultimate seignurial sign, reified and codified in the one drop rule?
Is our social ecology the product of evolution or intelligent design?
IMOHO - the one drop rule is one among myriad others brah..., reading the maimonides post - and feeling the cumulative effect of one megaton dot after another cause the hair to stand up on the back of my neck to an ambient mixture of x-clan samples playing in my head - I am certain that I have no ambitions predicated on the goodwill or wellbeing of either of the seignurial regimes squaring off on one another for the final go round in their centuries long battle...,
that peacock/peahen spectacle has almost nothing to do with us. I believe this leaves us free to busy ourselves with the serious Work of black cognitive activism defined strictly on our own terms.
I did not follow this thread during its formation but I have just gone through it and read with great interest the notes and comments posted by Ourstorian. I learned a great deal about an area where my knowledge and reading has been fairly limited. Thank you. I will have to print out your comments and make an effort to get my hands on some of the books and monographs you mentioned.
I thought so myself until I saw the drawing of Bennett with a noose around the neck of a black baby captioned with parallels to the holocaust.
But even then...to go further and suggest that non-black America dreams of an America where all black people have been killed, a Nazi outcome, ...
It's not that I'm particularly offended, it sounds more nutty than a sincere accusation, but I wonder why someone would suggest such things...unless they were advocating a future of isolation and alientation from "ordinary" America.
Reads to me like a complaint you need to take up with Glenn Ford, the editor-in-chief of the Black Commentator. More to the point, however, and in keeping with this delightful article at the end of the current issue;
My racial paranoia tells me the popular illustration of evolution is an insinuation that the white man is evolution’s final, finished, or ultimate product, while we darker-skinned peoples were just evolutionary “bumps� along the way. Either that, or we, the big-lipped, nappy-haired, well endowed, abundantly melanin-blessed (or cursed, if you’re a black neo-con), are aberrations that somehow arose after the white masterpiece was complete.
Regardless of whether or not I’m imaginative, the glaring inaccuracy of the popular chart of man’s ascendance highlights the need for black textbooks in black schools, written by black scientists, black science shows and journals that steer us away from miseducation. Where all my college grads at?
You're in for a very tough time just beyond the signpost up ahead then DW. Seems to me, and I'm generalizing from your cumulative expressions hereabouts, that you're only and exclusively capable of processing one version of logic, language, values, and history. Now, while you self-indulgently refuse to ever bring any supporting evidence to the table in support of the pov which you tirelessly champion, you do know how to link don't you? <_a href="linked url"_>linked text<_/a_>, remove the underscores and you're not deviating from that practice here, you have a pattern of reflexively sputtering that anybody who doesn't go along to get along with the dominant structured narrative is "alienated", "isolated", or "unsuccessful".
That's becoming your exclusive "oom pah pah" refrain.
Hasn't it occurred to you that the dominant structured narrative may partake in large measure of the Big Lie?
America has been systematically conditioned by white-owned media to fear, disdain, hate, and reject black men in the present moment. You're at liberty to attempt a rigorous refutation of this claim, as well. America has been conditioned by its liberal arts and sciences academies and popular press to fear, disdain, hate, and reject black men as an historical reality.
These practices are institutionalized to the point of being pervasive unwritten rules. Please feel free to explain the genesis of these rules, if you have an alternative motive you'd like to proffer?
The question for you to answer DW, and stop ducking and dodging so diligently is this;
Is our social ecology the result of evolution or ill-telligent design?
If the former, why shouldn't we work to actively debug and improve it? If the latter, why shouldn't we work to actively oppose and destroy it? What kind of mad man would I have to be to accept and endorse something so obviously illegitimate and antithetical to the interests of black men? Oh yeah, that's right, you answered that question in a previous thread, I'd have to be something along the lines of Clarence Thomas....,
you have a pattern of reflexively sputtering that anybody who doesn't go along to get along with the dominant structured narrative is "alienated", "isolated", or "unsuccessful".
I'm more than a bit of iconoclast myself cnulan; I'm not telling you to fall in line. But rejection of some or even all of the ordinary paths to success made available to all of us need not include hyperbolic claims that black people face a threat analogous to the holocaust.
What kind of mad man would I have to be to accept and endorse something so obviously illegitimate and antithetical to the interests of black men? Oh yeah, that's right, you answered that question in a previous thread, I'd have to be something along the lines of Clarence Thomas....,
I've described my black friends before cnulan. They're all successful professionals, with families and kids and mortgages just like me. Now they don't much like Clarence Thomas any more than you do. They're unhappy with the number of blacks in prison. They don't like DWB. They would agree I'm sure that racism exists today on many levels of life. They despise GW Bush. They don't like Condoleezza Rice.
But they don't much express alienation from America.
Is the American social ecology the result of natural selection or is it the result of ill-telligent design? If the latter, who was the intended beneficiary of the design?
I've described my black friends before cnulan...{they're some carefully griping knee-grows with whom I don't carry on in-depth discussions which is why I engage in-depth discussions here}...But they don't much express alienation from America.
There was a time in the not-too-distant past when black men had to be careful to conceal literacy, couldn't look a white man in the eye, and dared not appraise a white woman's peahen charms. I will projectively assert that you have neither a black friend or relative close enough to confide his true feelings to you. I will state matter-of-factly that a very significant percentage of black folks suppress their true feelings about the social ecology in which we're embedded. As surely as you ratiocinatively suppress coming to terms with factoids that conflict with your carefully cultivated and enobling structural narrative.
But all the above is merely psychological window dressing. My substantive critical concern about the American way of life is less rooted in its sundry overt psychopathologies, than it is my certain understanding of the thermodynamic fate awaiting America and the way that the operant psychopathologies will express themselves during the impending material crisis.
Having recently witnessed how America works in the course of and in the wake of Katrina, how do you suppose it'll work a year from now when the price of gasoline and natural gas have doubled yet again, and, the inevitable domino effect that this will exert on the supply chain becomes more clearly manifested?
"Earlier treatments of the subject by Du Bois, J.A. Rogers, de-Graft Johnson, and John G. Jackson, were produced with a decidedly vindicationist agenda in mind. While their scholarship was by no means faulty or flawed, they were in the unenviable position of having to both define and defend the humanity of black people every time they put words to paper. Their intention of correcting the omissions of Western history and of setting the record straight about African cultural and intellectual achievements, while commendable and necessary, nevertheless, generally failed to situate Moorish culture within the larger context of Arabic hegemony and its promotion and expansion of color prejudice and racial slavery."
I need to retract a part of this statement as it is factually incorrect. The statement that Du Bois and the others "failed to situate Moorish culture within the larger context of Arabic hegemony and its promotion and expansion of color prejudice and racial slavery"is wrong.Du Bois and deGraft Johnson, in particular, did not overlook the problems of race prejudice and slavery within the Islamic empire. In my effort to defend their vindicationist strategies, I mis-stated the point I was trying to make.
I also should mention that I ommitted the name Jan Carew from the list of black scholars who established the intellectual foundation for Ivan van Sertima's "The Golden Age of the Moor." Carew, who is also a contributor to that collection of essays, is Van Sertima's mentor and countryman, and has been one of the leading figures in Africana studies. I highly recommend his work.
"My racial paranoia tells me the popular illustration of evolution is an insinuation that the white man is evolution’s final, finished, or ultimate product, while we darker-skinned peoples were just evolutionary “bumps” along the way. Either that, or we, the big-lipped, nappy-haired, well endowed, abundantly melanin-blessed (or cursed, if you’re a black neo-con), are aberrations that somehow arose after the white masterpiece was complete."
In the modern world system, History serves to make the past intelligible, tangible, meaningful and manageable. It replaces the old mythic cycles of time and the mythological mysteries of human existence with a linear conceptualization of time as a progressive and teleological force that reveals the meaning of human history through its expression and fulfillment in the emergence and domination of the West. Time is both the currency and the commodity of this ideology. It is the argument for Western superiority and its proof. Yet for all the struggles of humanity to perfect, divide and structure systems of measurement and theories of change into calendars and historical periods no one actually knows what time it is. The fundamental question of historical orientation (what time is it?) is answerable only in reference to whose time it is. Whose time is it? The Christian calendar tells us it is the year 2005. But it is 6240 according to the first Egyptian calendar, 5764 in the Jewish calendar, 2548 in the Buddhist calendar, and 1424 in the Muslim calendar. Thus historical time functions as an ideological matrix, a system of belief and faith structured and organized to maintain and preserve the cult in power and the power of the cult. Since the advent of the so-called modern world, the cult in power has been Eurocentric and its power has been white supremacy.
Like the panoramas in anthropology books that purportedly illustrate human evolution from an ape-like ancestral specimen in Africa along an unbroken line to its apotheosis as a white man in Europe, the inexorable march of History is a trick of the mind’s eye, a mirage in the desert of the real, a solipsistic self-deception similar to the optical illusion of the sun rising and setting on the earth’s horizons.
Human beings conduct their lives with this social illusion in the foreground and the material reality in the background. With the earth’s movement mistakenly perceived as the movement of the sun, we spend our days (and nights) in a state of functional incoherence convinced we are headed straight to the future while going around in circles. Functional incoherence also describes the state or condition in which modern history operates. As a totalizing scientific account of human events, History functions as a coherent statement of the incoherence of the human experience in time. It posits Europe as the nexus where history begins and ends (the horizons where the sun rises and sets), and thus makes time the servant of European ideology and socio-economic power. It convenes its narratives—which do not conform to reality but to what reality is imagined to be or projected to be—using pseudo-scientific arguments steeped in the rhetoric of rationality and reason to simulate verisimilitude and universality. In this sense, History is a ruse instantiated and ratified in the imaginary of the West to establish and maintain the West’s epistemological dominance over the rest of us. As a hegemonic project of colonialism, its nature and function is to assimilate and integrate all local particularities and temporalities into the pseudo-universality of the modern world system. By conceiving and convening the past in its own image (the European imaginary) the past then becomes the representative means whereby the Euro-American polity controls the present and shapes the future.
Human beings conduct their lives with this social illusion in the foreground and the material reality in the background......History is a ruse instantiated and ratified in the imaginary of the West to establish and maintain the West’s epistemological dominance over the rest of us.
Though I reached back to establish an alternative reference frame in which the present terror of the situation can be considered, I would be remiss to leave off the theme at this deep juncture. Beyond the background seignurial bias of originalistic just-so-storytelling - our logic, language, and values are now conditioned by the foreground immersive power of mass media that the propagandists could have only ever fantasized about.
After classes at the learning center yesterday, I fell in with some of the elders who were talking about Bennett. In the light of where this thread left off one of them stated quite correctly that no matter how great the plague of cutting and shooting on saturday night in the hood, it's small potatos as against the major crimes perpetrated in broad daylight by this country. Nothing done in the aggregate by blacks over a twenty year span equates with the whole country jack move perpetrated by the present administration.
There is a sinister genius at work in the process that demonizes and focuses on petty individual criminality while enobling and legitimating wholesale, genocidal, corporate criminality. That is the special genius of the American seignurial MO. Mass media is the leading evolutionary edge of the audacious machinery of the Big Lie - which is the very embodiment and essence of how this do one thing and say another system works.
There is a sinister genius at work in the process that demonizes and focuses on petty individual criminality while enobling and legitimating wholesale, genocidal, corporate criminality.
Well cnulan there's two non-petty issues in the drug distribution problem.
1. Murder. As in young black men murdering a variety of mostly black people in an effort to protect their income.
2. The conveyor belt from jr. high to prison for young black men. The understanding that there's plenty of money to be made without knowing fractions.
I don't believe the solution here is to trivialize and point off to the side. Legalizing drugs may well be a real solution, but lacking political support, an alternative would be useful.
and it is this lack that is precisely the rub. nowhere ever have I seen a rational, econometric justification of the historical U.S. drug prohibition and the amplified contemporary War on Black Men
As a matter of fact, the entire history of the U.S. drug prohibition is so tightly bound up in racism and xenophobia as to point toward a fundamental and intractable barrier to logical entry. It's an absolute interrupt in the logical structure of American governance policy that undermines any conceivable apologetic you could advance in that cause DW.
an alternative would be useful.
Nothing less than the integrity of the American system is at stake here. There are no acceptable alternatives to legislative correction of this grotesque, racist, and irrational domestic war on black men. every other possible claim presented by the American system is rendered moot by this highly damaging vestige of jim crow which clearly discloses the seignurial nature of the American social ecology.
I don't believe the solution here is to trivialize and point off to the side.
I agree, so let's address the primary problem space;
Blacks own no poppy or coca fields.
Blacks own none of the ships, planes, and tractor trailers that support the wholesale importation and distribution.
Blacks own and control none of the banks that launder the massive coin and currency flows arising from narcotics trade.
Blacks own and control none of the media which glorifies and propagandizes the narcotraficante lifestyle.
Blacks are not the primary consumers of the contraband materials.
Blacks control none of the legislative power required to eliminate these jim crow laws.
Blacks control none of the laws required to control gun proliferation and we all know where the overwhelming majority of crime guns come from.
Blacks manufacture no guns or bullets.
Which aspect of white America's racist socio-ecological assault on young black men and the well-being of the community which depends on the seignurial viability of young black men would you like to take on first DW?
Which aspect of white America's racist socio-ecological assault on young black men and the well-being of the community which depends on the seignurial viability of young black men would you like to take on first DW?
Call it hegemony. Call it a racist plot. Call it reality.
When you point off to the side, you're part of the problem, not part of the solution.
White people might have set up the trap of easy drug money, but black people take the bait with their eyes wide open.
So what did white people gain by setting up the trap? And what level of responsibility for the resulting problem do the have as the creators of the trap?
cnulan isn't pointing to the side, he's pointing to the center. It only looks like the side if you think we should be going in circles.
So what did white people gain by setting up the trap?
What did white people gain by prohibition? They were following a belief that making something criminal would make it go away, and what they got was a funding mechanism for criminal organizations. It sems a recurring bad idea.
And what level of responsibility for the resulting problem do the have as the creators of the trap?
Pretty much the same resonsibility those who would take guns away from law abiding people would face when the compliant were victimized by criminals.
cnulan isn't pointing to the side, he's pointing to the heart.
When there's a trap, and you'r watching people take the bait, pointing anywhere but the trap is not useful in reducing the inflow into the trap. It's a distraction. It lessens the will and the information to avoid.
White people might have set up the trap of easy drug money
might have?
Stop struggling...,
The American system has so many stress fractures - now fully evident - that it's only a matter of time before it buckles under its own inconsistencies.
All the kings men with all the tools in the world at their disposal can't even manage to keep the story straight any longer DW.
I believe in the indomitable integrity of blackness. I trust the common sense of black folks and I lend my highest and best efforts toward the furtherence of the same.
As for the devolutionary and blind-alley'd endogamous American way of life,
MENE–MENE–TEKEL–UPARSIN
This is the interpretation of the thing:
MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and brought it to an end.
Dan. 5:25-26
And what level of responsibility for the resulting problem do the have as the creators of the trap?
Pretty much the same resonsibility those who would take guns away from law abiding people would face when the compliant were victimized by criminals.
That would be pretty much absolute, right?
When there's a trap
Aren't white people being trapped in depending on these incorrect expectations? How are you helping white people out of that? Aren't you coming up short by not working to discredit this recurring bad idea?
"There is a sinister genius at work in the process that demonizes and focuses on petty individual criminality while enobling and legitimating wholesale, genocidal, corporate criminality. That is the special genius of the American seignurial MO. Mass media is the leading evolutionary edge of the audacious machinery of the Big Lie - which is the very embodiment and essence of how this do one thing and say another system works."
Absolutely.
One of the network news programs (ABC or NBC, I don't remember which) did a story on folks scamming the government for Katrina funds. The story began with footage depicting a black woman being taken into custody and handcuffed by white cops for collecting money that was supposed to aid the victims of Katrina. I believe several thousand dollars had been fraudulently collected. As the story continued, attention was given to a website that had managed to scam folks out of more than 40k in a matter of a few days or so by claiming they were airlifting sick children from Louisiana to various hospitals around the south. Of course there was no such program and no air service, it was a bogus website. Footage showed the website, but nothng was said about the perpetrators or any arrests. The news story then ended by returning to footage of the unidentified black women under arrest and waiting to be transported to jail.
This happens in the media everyday. The face of crime in America is black by design.
"Nothing done in the aggregate by blacks over a twenty year span equates with the whole country jack move perpetrated by the present administration."
If Americans actually believed their own rhetoric about justice and human rights, Bush and his cronies would be locked up in Guantanamo awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. Nothing done in the aggregate by black folks since our ancestors first arrived on these shores can compare with the crimes of the current administration.
"There are no acceptable alternatives to legislative correction of this grotesque, racist, and irrational domestic war on black men. every other possible claim presented by the American system is rendered moot by this highly damaging vestige of jim crow which clearly discloses the seignurial nature of the American social ecology."
The jim crow application of drug laws makes them highly useful and lucrative tools for maintaining the status quo of white supremacy. Not only do they serve as pretexts for the mad dog policing of black communities, they also provide a vital revenue stream for cops, judges, lawyers, and the contractors who build and maintain the prison industrial complex. Even the phone companies have climbed on board, charging usurious rates for long distance calls from prisons, rates prisoners and their families can ill-afford. This operates in concert with the practice of housing black inmates in rural prisons where they provide jobs and incomes for white folks and contribute to the census data used to calculate and apportion Congressional representation. Thus black and Latino felons, who have been excised from voter roles, form a critical segment in the population of these rural voting districts. This practice in some ways mimics the clause established in the U.S. Constitution authorizing the use of the formula that a black slave constituted 3/5 of a human being for the purpose of determining proportional representation in slave-holding states. As you can imagine, many of the "representatives" from these voting districts go to Washington and vote against the interests of black folks in general, and for the continuation of the policies that foster and maintain the ghetto-prison pipeline. Their jobs depend on it.
The American system has so many stress fractures - now fully evident - that it's only a matter of time before it buckles under its own inconsistencies.
Remember James Watt? The guy who said it doesn't much matter if we conserve because the second coming of Christ is imminent?
Would you be a latter day James Watt, cnulan? Telling young black men that it's ok if they end up in prison, because things are going to buckle any day now. That maybe it's their civic duty as black men do do some time as a way to bring the second coming collapse of America sooner?
That kind of thinking--it ain't me it's white people--but massive forces are about to set things straight--is a significant factor in the bad judgement which is resulting in massive incarceration of black males. It means they don't need to learn fractions, rather they can be out their raking in the dough and having way more money than the kids in school. There might be doom ahead, but hey, I'm doomed anyway unless and until those forces of God arrive.
Would you be a latter day James Watt, cnulan? Telling young black men that it's ok if they end up in prison, because things are going to buckle any day now.
Stop struggling DW.
We're all looking at all the cards you've ever held in your hand. What you call common sense, or originalism, or even reality, no longer possesses any of the mimetic stealth qualities that formerly made it slippery or difficult to discern. You're busted brotha.
"Hail, hail, fire and snow, call the angel we will go, far away, for to see, friendly angel come to me".
That kind of thinking--it ain't me it's white people--but massive forces are about to set things straight--is a significant factor in the bad judgement which is resulting in massive incarceration of black males.
Seems to me the imperative is for each one to teach one about the nature of Gorgan such that not a moment longer is wasted in fundamentally futile repartee.
James Baldwin long ago provided the best response to this Jewish oneupmanship: "It is not here, not now, that the Jew is being slaughtered, and he is never despised, here, as the Negro is, because he is an American. The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him."
Holocaust consciousness today is thoroughly embedded in mainstream popular culture. This has happened, Novick writes, because American Jews "are not just 'the people of the book,' but the people of the Hollywood film and the television miniseries, of the magazine article and the newspaper column, of the comic book and the academic symposium."
Now, my kingdom for a powerful and rigorous exegesis of blaxploitation cinema and the way in which ill-telligent engineering of the American social ecology has been impacted by Hollywood and the six-o-clock evening news....,
Novick's contention is that "the Holocaust" was constructed twenty-five years after the war in a way that would not have been recognizable to Jews or gentiles in 1945. Indeed, Novick shows that while the Holocaust as such was hardly talked about from 1945 to 1965, from the seventies on it became increasingly central to Jewish self-consciousness.
The horrors of the holocaust were first presented to Americans as photographs of the concentration camps which were taken coincident with the fall of the Nazis during the spring of 1945. Within a year or so it had become clear what the Nazis had done. People may well have been numbed by the atomic bomb, but the horror was well established in the American common experience by 1947. As a kid during the late '50s, not even knowing any Jews as Jews, I sure knew about it, and knew why it was important.
Novick is a revisionst.
Baldwin's point (quoted 3rd hand and interpreted here..) that there exist certain parallels between Jews, historically, and blacks in America is reasonable, including the fact that no one's likely to "rescue" American blacks. Presumably, he's arguing that American blacks need to effect their own solution, and that's reasonable too.
Here's the thing DW, those mindfilters through which you reprocess every iota of data presented hereabouts not only make you an exemplary revisionist, they make you a solipsistic revisionist in near-real-time, as well.
The minute we become collectively introspective in significant numbers, pragmatically turning our backs on what you term success methinkst you'll have a very hard time coming to terms with the afrofuturist re-engineering of reality. We're doing our level best to help you, but your obstinacy is getting in the way of your growth possibilities. Spence did a nice job of summarizing the problem inhering to your self-limiting point of view...,
If you're going to overturn established common understanding, you have to present overwhelming evidence. There's no shortage of cranks who try to make a living or an ego presenting plausible alternative scenarios, aimed at an audience who is motivated to believe. Regular people are well defended against such cranks. That raises the bar for those who would change common understanding, but it means that when they do so, they tend to achieve the change quickly and decisevely, because their evidence is in fact overwhelming.
You've somehow managed to conflate legislating and discussing. You presume that I care to overturn "common understanding". I don't. All I care to do is to objectively inform those capable of processing data objectively. Verification is all that is essential, not consensus. A partial consensus of American "common understanding" voted the present administration into office and is now regretting ever having done so.
You, for your part, bring scant little evidence to any of these discursive proceedings and audaciously presume that I or anyone else shares your "common understanding". You're not defended against cranks DW, you're simply obstinate in your refusal to consider information that doesn't fit your common understanding. Stop getting it twisted. We're discussing, not legislating, and you have here-to-date brought no evidence in support of your position to the discussion.
How did the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum get built on the Mall in Washington, DC (it opened in 1993) before the National Museum of the American Indian (opened in 2004) and a National Museum for African Americans?
While I understand the mission of the Holocaust Museum, I don't believe it should have been located on the Mall. Many Jewish Americans were victims of the Holocaust, but, aside from America's belated response to it, a response actually predicated by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust itself is not a part of American history.
On the other hand, the holocausts perpetrated against Native peoples in America and against African peoples transported to America, constitute the very marrow of this nation's body politic. Yet, as always is the case, they are afterthoughts in the nation's historical memory.
This afternoon at the learning center, I was making dynebolic discs for the boys and listening to the elders talk about pan-africanism over the backdrop of the MMM. {i'm testing an ubuntu partition on one of my machines, and after I beat on it a while, I might possibly be tempted to shift or at the very least broaden my loyalties}
A wealthy Yoruba visitor was present during this discussion. I stayed out of it for the most part, as I was busy, and frankly more interested in hearing what my elders had to say. I casually kept my eye on our Nigerian brother though, watching his body language as the elders talked among themselves about the MMM and in process of trying to engage him in their discussion, called him an Ibo - {he visibly cringed in response to this sleight}.
To make the long story short, I couldn't resist jumping into the fray as it centered on the concept of unity, and so I put the brother rather intensely on the spot by asking him about kinship structures among the Yoruba. I asked him why, if pan-africanism seems such like such a capital idea among American black folk, who are now by default among the most exogamous people on the face of the earth, why hasn't it ever taken hold in say for example, Nigeria? Suffice it to say, the brother was at such a loss for words that he suddenly had to pack up his gear and get out of dodge.
Funny how people can be when you question their cultural and political views about open source genomics....,
just as i said on the other post - privilege allows liars to lie and otherwise...in reading the above, it's truly compelling to hear dw's CLARITY and AWARENESS in observing the aftermath of Nazi activity - based on photographs observed during youth...i wonder how many pictures have been ignored over the past FIVE DECADES that he is now so vague about how privilege is a part of his life...
i love blogs...you can run, but you can't hide. i done with that cat. jensen did neglect to mention the psychological games that white folks must play in order to justify their material and ideological existence. what fun.
"Presumably, he's arguing that American blacks need to effect their own solution, and that's reasonable too."
Then why are you and other whites so deeply resistent to the prescriptions that we offer to address our problems? Oh! I get it. You want to see solutions that DO NOT entail any social, financial or political costs for yourselves.
Then why are you and other whites so deeply resistent to the prescriptions that we offer to address our problems?
I'm sure we could identify some of those prescriptions which I and maybe other whites wouldn't resist at all, PT.
The resisted ones seem to fall into one of two categories:
1. More of the same which hasn't worked before
2. Racial preference enforced by law
You want to see solutions that DO NOT entail any social, financial or political costs for yourselves.
Lots of money, time, and effort have gone down the drain. Lots of money, tjme, and effort remain available, but there's an unwillingness to pour good money after bad.
There are "prescriptions" which seem to be working. I caught a PBS thing about public schools in N. Carolina which was very promising, particularly in the worst of schools. When the technique was attempted in San Diego, it was killed off by the teacher's union. I'm willing to suggest that if we were to double the salary of every teacher in San Diego, and double all non-salary budgets, that the perrformance of the worst schools in San Diego would not improve at all. On the other hand, if we figure out what works, and it involves demanding that teachers actually teach the curriculum rather than substituting their own judgement (a key aspect of the N. Carolina and one NYC district's solution) then scores rise as if by miricle. (the other key aspect was very frequent testing to see if the kids had actually learned the curriculum)
So I think there do exist important prescriptions for which time and money are available.
Given that we know it's doable, why not demand that failing schools be improved? Why not march on such schools to draw attention to the demand? You won't find any opposition from white people, PT, except those in teacher's unions.
Well, then let's try some new things like adequately funding public schools; providing affordable childcare for single parents trying to get off the dole and investing in small scale and sustainable retail economic enterprises in poor communities instead of massive redevelopment projects that tend only to benefit people who don't live in the affected areas.
"WHITE PEOPLE TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR PART OF THE MESS????"
Too hard! So is adequately funding our public schools because too many white folks have bought into the neo-liberal and neo-conservative absurdity that spending more money won't help inner-city public schools. Spending more money does absolute wonders for public schools located in suburban areas however as my wife and I and nearly all of our neighbors, including those who don't believe that inner-city public schools need more funding, will readily and willingly attest to.
dangerous to simply throw out the notion of social policy failures without a related empirical analysis of efficiency and effectiveness. underfunding, short-term support and election year politicking have always complicated these factors.
dw is right about the complicity of teachers unions (and by implication, the DEMOCRATIC party) in undermining the academic achievement of students. still, for two dynamic collectives to reach an agreement on this level, reason will not be the operative lever. it never has been and never will be. given that africans have shed blood for just about every "right" that americans enjoy - beyond those related to demands of the tax-weary children of england, america has little hope BEYOND more black folk dying in pursuit of some lofty goal. the next best option would be for white women and children to offer up their bodies in the cause. if it bleeds it leads. time for someone else to play christ-figure. it seems to be the only thing the collective understands.
and since soccer moms ain't givin' it up for nobody, the gap shall not be closed beyond prescriptions intended to make soccer moms feel safe. so, while the daughters of the soccer moms feel safe enough to get with snoop and flash for cash (and more, I'm told), the generation gap is difficult. perhaps america can age it's way out of this problem - led by the loose morals and profligate degeneracy of young white women. think mary magdalene and the internet...think redemption and liberation.
that's a relatively bloodless proposition to the historical alternative. teachers gone wild, $19.99 - infomercials with testimonials from bay buchanan and the like.
the question of whether "inner-city schools" (i assume you don't mean the prestigious prep schools in which the urban 'elite' are educated - but rather schools with poor black and/or latino children...hate euphemisms) require additional funding is complex.
for example, it is difficult to argue that teacher salaries should be increased by as much as 33% (as they have in NYC over the past few years) unless the city can ensure the best teachers are in the lowest performing schools (a recently won component of NYC's negotiations). this is rare across the nation. the youngest, most inexperienced teachers learn the craft in "inner-city" schools (ha, ha) and then bounce once their skills improve and they've strengthened their negotiating position. it's a triage system that is sustained, dw, generally by the daughters (and a few sons) of white america. it's an interesting dynamic. but the bottom line is that scores don't move because the number one indicator of student success is TEACHER QUALITY. unions and democrats have moved in LOCK STEP to ensure that these unassailable rights are not assailed. in NYC, it's a good thing that bloomberg switched party's.
even with these issues on the table, disparities in per pupil allocations between city and suburb can be as great as $10,000 per child. when you spend $10,000 more per child, per year (with more experienced teachers - using better resources) the test scores should be better in the burbs. they should be significantly better. none of this is rocket science. so, unions need to make concessions. parents need to be more involved, but pundits and analysts should not proffer disingenuous arguments about the implications of vastly divergent funding for schools. a successful student attending a school where per pupil expenditures (ppe's) are between $8000 and $12000 (typically with teachers with 0-3 years experience) must be commended because he/she will eventually compete with students where ppe's are as high as $21,000 (and where 90-100% of teachers have master's degrees, undergraduate degrees in the subject they're teaching, and 5-10+ years of experience). in this context, notions of an achievement gap are pretty comical. so, these issues deserve a broader platform than this medium tends to support.
but the bottom line is that scores don't move because the number one indicator of student success is TEACHER QUALITY.
I'm sure not going to argue that teacher quality isn't an important factor. What I have observed however is that failing schools are in a rut which is too deep to get out of by simple improvement of teacher quality.
The N. Carolina and NYC success story did not involve changing teachers, it involved changing teaching.
The rut I observed, and the evidence seems clear that my direct observations generalize fairly well, is the rut of low expectations. A majority of the students arrived at school with no intent of participating in education, they arrived for entertainment. The teachers went along; if the students should master fractions in the 6th grade, but in the entire class none of them could, the teacher lowered expectations. If by chance a teacher maintained expecations, that was quashed by administration, who stood by parents who demanded to know why students were't receiving passing grades, suggesting that the teacher was failing rather than the students. A rut. A deep, failing rut. More money into such a rut means more entrenchment of those on the receiving end.
In California, it is already the case that these failing schools receive more money than the best schools in the state. All schools are constitutionally funded equally by default, with supplemental money going to address problems rather than to reward success.
I'll repeat: white people in particular and society in general are more than willing to fund better education for those mostly black children who currently expreience failing schools. What we don't want and aren't willing to fund is twice as much of the same.
No doubt there's more than one way out of the rut. The N. Carolina and NYC successes I described earlier are one. If there's more, let's try them.
1. Far better schooling is available for kids now attending failing schools.
2. Nothing is going to change without demand from regular people with kids in those schools.
3. The demand cannot be abstract. The demand has to be precisely stated as "far better results".
4. We all need to understand that a successful school will be operated considerably differently than the currently failing schools.
5. Imagine sending your kid off to school with "the reason you're failing in school son is because white people are failing to accept responsibility". I considered the potential that some local posters might actually do such a thing, but concluded that I knew them better than that.
5. Imagine sending your kid off to school with "the reason you're failing in school son is because white people are failing to accept responsibility". I considered the potential that some local posters might actually do such a thing, but concluded that I knew them better than that.
Let's skip all of this irrelevant folderol that you always manage to inject into these kind of discussions. Let's put aside the issue of teachers' compensation, which is obviously of great concern to teachers and their dependents and creditors and protectors of the public treasury like yourself, but not uppermost in the minds of people who have to send their children to these miserable dwellings that masquerade as places devoted to educating and enlightening children about the world.
Let's begin with the physical plants themselves. These decaying, decrepit, aging and dying structures have long outlived their alleged usefulness as schools if, in fact, they ever served such a purpose for the greater part of the young people sentenced to these facilities for seven hours a day, five days a week for thirteen years. The costs to maintain these buildings, power them up, keep them clean and refurbish them cannot be justified on any reasonable grounds.
Every urban area in America has abandoned or underutilized buildings that can with minimum costs be turned into schools that would serve 100 to 250 students. These buildings would be cheaper to maintain, heat, illuminate, clean and repair. There would be no need for full time janitors, cafeteria workers and the entire menagerie of service personnel that are nearly always required when you stuff several thousand young, active and curious young people into a large building and shut the doors. With a reduced number of students there would be a corresponding reduction in the number of educational managers needed to oversee the facility, e.g., principals, vice-principals, head counselors, student services advisors, P.E. teachers etc.
The resultant savings in costs could be used to increase and improve the school district's course offerings including reinvigorating the arts, science, language and music programs. The surplus school properties could be leased on a long term basis to non-profit and for profit housing developers to convert these existing structures into affordable housing with a mixture of small and appropriate retail shops that cater to the development's residents and members of the surrounding community. A percentage of these new housing units could be set aside for young teachers who more often than not cannot afford to pay for decent market rate housing within the boundaries of the school district that employs them.
The school district would agree to forego any direct lease payments for the use of the land and demand instead that the funds be used to create a neighborhood improvement district. The improvement district's chief purpose would be to facilitate the kinds of neighborhood amenities that would attract a diverse mix of people from differing income groups. In other words, the school district would be actively promoting policies creating greater economic integration in poorer urban neighborhoods.
The smaller schools would be much better suited to offering an environment that is conducive to educating young people. A smaller school, for example, would provide a more relaxed and secure atmosphere for children to feel safe and secure. Children with special needs or who are at greater risk than their classmates can be more easily identified and provided with the support they need.
If over time the school's enrollment increased to a point that the existing facility became too small then the district could find another building or add to the existing building without incurring the huge capital costs, often unwritten by issuing and selling bonds, that serve to financially cripple many urban school districts today. The Los Angeles Unified School District (this is a contradiction in terms) recently spent in excess of $38 million to build a new high school before discovering that the new plant was built over a toxic dump that itself was constructed over an earthquake fault. The school will never be occupied but the bondholders will still have to be paid off.
The wrangling between liberals and conservatives over urban public education in the United States has devolved into little more than a pissing match with parents and, more importantly, students being held hostage to one bullshit crank theory or jive-ass political agenda after another. What is needed here is a reimagining of the purpose of public schools and a willingness to take small scale practical risks in order to create a better school system.
I forgot to say that high school SPORTS as we have come know it in urban school districts would wither away too under my plan, but there is no reason why the existing gymnasiums, track fields etc. cannot be turned over to local YMCAs or similar institutions in the area with the provision that these institutions assume responsibility for running basketball leagues and soccer teams etc.
The wrangling between liberals and conservatives over urban public education in the United States has devolved into little more than a pissing match with parents and, more importantly, students being held hostage to one bullshit crank theory or jive-ass political agenda after another.
I agree with this completely PT. There's no shortage of cranks.
On the other hand, we need a way to:
know the difference between success and failure
be doing experiments in failing situations
pursue successful experiments
tell the teacher's unions that the students come first
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Casting dots upon the
Casting dots upon the waters...., which hopefully can be connected up into a coherent outline
quoth DW;
If by "same general dynamic" you mean historically that the Aryans conquered and did with the pre-existing Children of God {harijans} much the same as the Spaniards did with the pre-existing Children of God {indios} - ok - there are actually intensely striking parallels - some of which carry through to the modern era.
That trouble in Chiapas is of course a racially demarcated culture/governance war. Funny how little attention that situation now garners in our media...,
I formerly did binnis in Mexico City and Juarez. I currently do Binnis in Bangalore. My stature, complexion, features, and bald-head don't set off any unconscious triggers with any of my counterparts in either locale. This is also true in KCK and on the West Side of KC, longstanding, traditional Mexican hoods where I have never, ever had a moment's interpersonal hiccup, at all.
So, as a practical matter, race-mixing has obviated the issue for me, at least in those specific contexts.
The Golden Age of the Moor
The Golden Age of the Moor edited by Ivan Van Sertima provides a wealth of evidence concerning the extension of Africa up through the Pyranees for centuries. Islam drove massive intermarriage and race-mixing. Almost, one is inclined to think, to the point of making it a conscious and intentional aspect of Islamic governance. In any event, links to relevant articles can be found here. My review of Rashidi's exceedingly generous web dispensation doesn't show any articles that go into the specific depth of some of the chapters of this book, so I may have to transcribe some pages for emphasis. If I get about a half/hour later on, I'll try to do the transcription, no promises, as I've got to go to a meeting of uncertain duration right now.
In any event, so you know where I'm headed with this, in case you're inclined to throw in on this theme, I believe that the Spanish and even more profoundly the Portuguese cultures are cultural and racial melanges. Nowhere is the result of centuries of race mixing more evident than in Brazil and Venezuela - the latter of which has a black and indian popularly elected president who's presently giving American conservatives fits.
So, as a practical matter,
So, as a practical matter, race-mixing has obviated the issue for me, at least in those specific contexts.
In both Mexico and India, light skin color translates into unearned privilege. That's the "same general dynamic" I referenced. That seemed evidence that mixing wasn't in and of itself a real solution.
That's not to say that dark skinned people in those countries face the issues of black Americans.
So maybe I over-stated the negativity as an analog to a future after massive mixing.
Historically (over 100k years), the only long lived barriers to mixing have been geographic. Religious and cultural ones came and then went. If life survives, we can predict with near certainty that the people who inhabit North America in the year 3000 will have mixed and mixed a whole lot.
"Islam drove massive
"Islam drove massive intermarriage and race-mixing."
Let's not forget that Islam also drove the African slave trade, and still does in many "Muslim" nations. That Arabs in particular were major contributors to the evolution and advancement of antiblack racism is indisputable. Consult the ethnological discourses produced by Arab scholars during the "Golden Age of the Moors" and you find primer after primer on antiblack racism. Not even "black" Muslims were spared this racial animus, as they are not spared today in Darfur in the Sudan.
Moreover, we should not for a moment believe that "race-mixing" has somehow mitigated antiblack racism. To the contrary, in countries like Brazil and India it created intricate caste systems that are in most cases grounded in "color consciousness." Brazil and India, in particular, follow racist traditions and social practices that surpass apartheid in the dehumanization and brutalization of millions of their citizens.
We also are talking about the mixing of haplotypes or clines not races. Biological race is a fiction.
We also are talking about
an objective but not a psychological given...,
which is it O, Islam? or Arabs? seems to me that a significant distinction ought be drawn here. What I'm interested in getting at are the immiscible psychological crunchy bits that are subliminally maintained and exploited to control kinship, politics, and economics.
Islamic practice was constructed so as to undermine those particular crunchy bits. Along with the coincidence of strategic resources underlying Muslim population concentrations, I suspect that that's one of the primary reasons that it has been targetted in these here contemporary culture wars. Despite significant failings, Islam has proven its mettle across centuries in ways that no variant of Marxism ever could.
My core thesis is that nothing in the land of the free and the home of the brave is comparably architected to undermine tribal or kinship crunchy bits - save possibly the U.S. Armed Forces. At the end of the day, one of the core political polarities I want to examine is that which pits intentional and inadvertent practitioners of human husbandry against intentional and inadvertant practitioners of laissez faire miscegenation.
We also are talking about
Nicely done O. I thank you for the careful and intentional choice of terms, in so doing, you've already pointed out the way for any interested other to redefine their mapping of the problem space.
Racism is embedded in the
What is G-Dub?
Sometimes O, your righteous indignation appears to cloud your objective discernment..,
couple corollary
couple corollary dots...,
concerning the Inquisition then
and concerning the Inquisition recently...,
The physician-sponsored anti-midwife campaign condemned midwives as "dirty" 28 and "a relic of barbarism."29 Midwife use was common among blacks and former slaves and the campaign played on racial prejudice referring to midwives as "filthy and ignorant and not far removed from the jungles of Africa."30 The physicians also preyed upon the public’s bias against the European immigrants and the growing fear of communism in proclaiming midwives "un-American."31
Pursuant to pharmacological and occult interests of my own, I helped a young woman research and prepare her graduate thesis at Harvard on the politics of the Inquisition. So I'm not coming to this from a purely coincidental angle of approach. First, it was a largely secular campaign of terrorism, second it was aided and abetted by the secret society(s) comprising barber-surgeon guild(s), third, you don't really believe that the imagery of the black man of the forest, or the two-horned god is accidental? Do you?
"which is it O, Islam? or
"which is it O, Islam? or Arabs? seems to me that a significant distinction ought be drawn here."
I see both as complicit in the evolution and development of antiblack racism. But I would be interested in any distinctions you care to make.
I have no objection to the
I have no objection to the one-sided presentation given here O. I believe quite a number of interesting questions are begged, but I believe the map of Islam does not identically coincide with the map of the Arab world.
Notice this author also uses Arabic and Islamic interchangeably...,
I haven't forgotten
I haven't forgotten transcription of intermarriage in the furtherance of Moorish interpenetration of southern Europe..,
Knowing a bit about the occulted history of seignurial practices in Europe, the contemporary spectral light of collective anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.K., American white flight, Brown v. Board, war on drugs, war on terra, black male criminalization, the so-called enemy within, and Bennett's lip slip - all seem like conservative embodiments pointing in a definite direction to me.
Next links will deal with the expulsions and the role of the so-called Inquisition in the same. The important fact to realize is that the Inquisition was a secular seignurial enterprise and not the Catholic Dominican just-so-story that's conventionally told and popularly believed.
That's just the way my *free* associations work...,
"why does the Arab world
"why does the Arab world have no corresponding Black population as is found in the New World? Lewis provides an answer, 'One reason is obviously the high population of eunuchs among Black males entering the Islamic lands."
Lewis is the master of the understatement: " the high population of eunuchs among Black males entering the Islamic lands". Sounds like those pesky black males stood at the borders and castrated themselves before immigrating.
Castration certainly is a factor, but other forces were at work. The brutally short life expectancy of black slaves in the Arab world is something Segal mentions briefly in "Islam's Black Slaves," and is also addressed by Manning in his demographic studies of the slave trade.
Concubinage and intermarriage clearly were factors in the assimilation of "others" into the Arab populations. While Arabs were castrating black males to make them house servants and harem guards, they were having children with black females.
"I have no objection to the
"I have no objection to the one-sided presentation given here O. I believe quite a number of interesting questions are begged, but I believe the map of Islam does not identically coincide with the map of the Arab world."
I was unaware of the site linked above. I'll check it out when I get the chance.
I realize "the map of Islam does not coincide" with the Arab world, geographically speaking. But Islam remains very much imbued with its Arab heritage. Praying to Mecca serves as a method to maintain Arab primacy if not hegemony. And, of course, Arabic is the language of the Holy Qu'ran.
"Islamic practice was
"Islamic practice was constructed so as to undermine those particular crunchy bits. Along with the coincidence of strategic resources underlying Muslim population concentrations, I suspect that that's one of the primary reasons that it has been targetted in these here contemporary culture wars."
Granted, "strategic resources" comprise an obvious justification for the current war between the monotheists (Jews, Christians, Muslims), but the conflict, as you know, is deeply rooted in the history of Jihad. Consider this excerpt from French historian Paul Fregosi's book, "Jihad," on the profound impact of Islam on Europe:
The war is deeply rooted in
The war is deeply rooted in something. It's radical as hell. Radical as the Inquisition with its serial genital mutilations, radical as lynchings with more of the same, radical as Abu Ghraib and the topical consideration of torture vs. terror underway in the House and Senate.
Remember a couple months ago when it was shown beyond any doubt that suicide bombings coincide with territorial invasion and occupation and have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam? I began thinking to myself then and there that the underlying motives for the culture war might run deeper than resource appropriation, though that's definitely a priority setting consideration.
Thinking about Bulworth vs. Lyedecker is what really focused this for me though. When primates in particular and mammalian vertebrates more generally square off for intraspecific conflict, it's usually over mating rights or in our post hoc people of the word terminology, "our way of life".
Then I think to myself, hmmm..., our? what means our in the context of America in which we don't enjoy the same prerogatives and access as certain other folk? Our territorial and other economic prerogatives are severly constrained, and until quite recently were held in check by the force of law.
We always talk about civil rights, but isn't it really only a modest gradation on the dial to switch so-called civil to seignurial? I mean after all, as a matter of fact, there is no equal rights amendment? Abortion or the woman's right to choose is hardly a settled matter? In a very real sense, full-citizen personhood has not been fully bestowed on well more than half the U.S. population. In a haplotypical sense, it wouldn't be an entirely unfounded stretch to talk about women in our so-called free society as embodying the characteristics of property as much as personhood under the law, and of course it goes without saying where we stood not so very long ago.
I'm not trying to be inflammatory, I'm just looking at what is codified into American law in a slightly atypical manner. Obviously, Islam comes to terms with these same issues in a strikingly different manner.
"strategic resources"
"strategic resources" comprise an obvious justification for the current war between the monotheists (Jews, Christians, Muslims)
Yes, radical strategic resources....,
because one people of the book is opposed to intermarriage...,
and no matter how liberally strenuous the presentation seems, some eugenic evidence belies all competing claims
it's not simple, but 1.1 Billion Muslims demonstrates that Islamic seignurialism is very highly effective...,
points touched upon in the first article go to the psycho-social root of the American dilemma;
My contention is that the policy at Bob Jones, the policy among the LDS folk in Utah, and numerous other such policies - both written and unwritten - have been the irrational crux of the American seignurial paradigm.
I've gotta get to some evidence underscoring the motives and methods of the expulsions. I've also got to touch on the permanent mark made by africanity on Europe that is still most vitally expressed in Brazil. Sheila Walker's classic article goes to the heart of how seignurial Africa had its way with Lashbuna...,
"it's not simple, but 1.1
"it's not simple, but 1.1 Billion Muslims demonstrates that Islamic seignurialism is very highly effective...,"
Part of the complexity of the issue goes to the manner in which "Islamic seignurialism" instantiated itself. Given the options of conversion versus death or slavery, many of those who faced Jihad chose the former. The history of resistance to Islamic conquest, particularly in North Africa, has not been adequately documented or disseminated. Would you care to comment on movements that resist seignurialism, Islam's, the Inquisitions', or others? I be interested in your connecting dots ....
Would you care to comment on
Thank you for hanging in there with me on this O. My parameters are admittedly a little expansive. My opinion of the histories with which I'm familiar leads me to believe that Moorish Islamic seignurialism has shown itself far and away the most civilized and tolerant of diversity. One need only consider the religious and academic freedom enjoyed in Spain under centuries of Moorish rule to see the truth of this assertion. Very obviously, the course of Western his-story and ourstory was fundamentally impacted by the visigothic explusion of Moors from southern europe.
This level of tolerance was rather obviously not the case throughout the entire Islamic world. This of course points us under the hood of a unitive Islam and directly toward the underlying tribal and cultural underpinnings of any given local Islamic flourishment.
I'm also not a western anti-Christian. As far as the Inquisition goes, it would be wrong to put that pogromme at the Catholic church's doorstep. Careful evaluation of documentary evidence - contrary to the popularly held mythology of the Inquisition - shows that it was a secular feudal movement. Of particular interest to me is the expulsion of jews and the moors from Spain, and the genocide enacted against the Cathars in southern france.
The U.S. is - in certain regards - a revolution against the European feudal order. However, the founding fathers who got themselves out from under one gangsterish boot, didn't hesitate to re-enact that same type of seignurial oppression on us - as the plantation was little different for us than the baronial fiefdom had been for them.
Coming ahead to today, it seems to me that black men in America are faced with some very interesting political choices in the years ahead. As you might imagine, I'm keenly interested in hearing what the honorable brother minister will have to say next week when he gets his national audience for a minute on C-SPAN. America for its part is keenly interested in the black political temperature because it realizes that it's now gotten itself into a death match on multiple simultaneous fronts.
Connecting up the dots. I believe the western way of life is fraught with insurmountable thermodynamic structural defects. Consequently, I believe opportunities exist to drive alternative social constructions. I am far more interested in black technocratic introspection and collaboration on the issues central to local thriving and flourishment. I deeply trust that we embody a Moorish civilizing ethos.
I do not believe it possible that the mainstream western way of life can prevail in the world war on which it is embarked. I personally have little doubt that it has reached the end of its cycle.
Politically, I believe much depends on how able America proves itself to be in shifting from an authoritarian to a libertarian mode of governance and conduct. If the former prevails, there's going to be hell up in harlem. If the latter, then all manner of possibilities unfold.
As things are now, I can't see my way clear to getting with the conservative program because I don't think full participatory kinship has been extended to me in this country by these people. If I go to a movie and see Denzel, or Will Smith representing with Cameron Diaz like Billy Bob Thornton did with Halle Berry - then I'd be more inclined to believe the lip service routinely paid - but seldom ever enacted - to a colorblind society.
We got tricked in the old west, in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam into fighting for a way of life in which we are not full participants. Now that you know the level at which I view full participatory standing, and the way in which this culture militates against our free expression of the fundamental Maslowian impulse - along quite definite color lines - I don't see allowing my son to wind up as a conscript in this other man's army. Should things change, and necessity is the mother of radical change, then perhaps I'll soften my view.
What do you think O?
Bennett is not alone in
Bennett is not alone in
Bennett is not alone in dreaming about dead black babies. Whether the thought is spoken aloud or not, the American fantasy is a world without any black people in it.
What do you hope to achieve posting stuff like that cnulan?
More isolation and alienation?
More isolation and
Just truth, is all. That's not enough for you?
What do you hope to achieve
explanatory objectivity...,
Your solipsism is showing through again DW. Do you really believe that the associations I'm exploring would alienate the majority of blacks, humans? Or are you only speaking self-referentially as the representative of a specific segment of white Americans who act one way, but explain their actions in an orthogonal other way?
It is my anecdotally, analytically, and liminally stated view that the roots of American racism are unavailable to rational and rhetorical intervention. In the course of this thread, I've outlined an atypical frame of reference that goes to motivations outside the threshold of political correctness.
Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to demonstrate the factual or interpretive error inhering to this assemblage. Perhaps you can outline an alternative motivational framework that will provide a more onto accounting of American racist behaviour, with particular emphasis on the past 30 odd years in which white self-segregation, public school integration (busing wars), the so-called War on Drugs, the ongoing War on Terra, and now recently, the unintended Freudian self-disclosure made by a leading conservative moralist. I could probably spin it up like Samad did as an ideological difference, but I suspect that these ideological blinds conceal an underlying practical motivation having nothing to do with the conventional political just-so-stories.
If you care to apply the lens of your ennobling behavioural interpretations to what I have outlined as a series of dots, then by all means, have at it.
I would love to see your interpretation of european seignurial imperatives. I would love to see your interpretation of the peculiar excesses of the Inquisition, Lynchings, and Abu Ghraib. I would love to see how you interpret the Culture War, the War on Drugs, War on Terra, and the media's imagistic War on Blackness - as all of the above emanate from a single ideological nexus.
If you can reconcile the rhetoric with the behaviours in a way that is more elegant and internally consistent, then I am your eager student.
I won't be holding my breath while I wait.
DW, read the article cnulan
DW, read the article cnulan linked. It's actually pretty mild stuff.
It's actually pretty mild
You have to understand. DW doesn't want to address any existing problems...pointing out existing problems is seeking isolation because no one wants to hear it.
"My opinion of the histories
"My opinion of the histories with which I'm familiar leads me to believe that Moorish Islamic seignurialism has shown itself far and away the most civilized and tolerant of diversity."
While what you say is no doubt true (especially when you compare Moorish Spain to its European neighbors), I think the degree of “tolerance” practiced there is highly overstated. Granted, the Moors in Spain developed an oasis of advanced learning in their Andalusian enclave, and they seemed somewhat accepting of "others" (especially Jewish scholars) in their presence, but the society they created was riven with divisions, secular and religious, and eventually came under the rule of Islamic fundamentalists (the Almoravid and Almohades dynasties) who could and perhaps do serve as models for today's jihadists.
Many black scholars (past and present) have succumbed to the tendency to idealize and romanticize the Moors (this is generally not the case with Van Sertima and “Golden Age of the Moors”). Earlier treatments of the subject by Du Bois, J.A. Rogers, de-Graft Johnson, and John G. Jackson, were produced with a decidedly vindicationist agenda in mind. While their scholarship was by no means faulty or flawed, they were in the unenviable position of having to both define and defend the humanity of black people every time they put words to paper. Their intention of correcting the omissions of Western history and of setting the record straight about African cultural and intellectual achievements, while commendable and necessary, nevertheless, generally failed to situate Moorish culture within the larger context of Arabic hegemony and its promotion and expansion of color prejudice and racial slavery. Those scholars and their groundbreaking studies, however, laid the foundations for Van Sertima’s compilation.
Two recent books by Menocal and Rubenstein continue this theme of tolerance. Menocal’s “Ornament of the World” (2002) and Rubenstein’s “Aristotle’s Children” (2003) both seek to present a more contemporary analysis of how everybody in Moorish Spain “got along” Rodney King style. The sub-title of Menocal’s book--“How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain” (italics added)--stretches the point to the absurd. Tolerance, according to my Random House Dictionary, denotes “a fair, objective, and permissible attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one’s own. Despite the possibility of some confusion on this point, tolerance does not connote or imply acceptance. Underlying the concept of “culture” is the notion that it consists of commonly “accepted” and agreed upon beliefs and behaviors. From this perspective, Menocal really seems to be referring to the pragmatic and expedient manner in which Jews, Muslims and Christians grudgingly cooperated with each other to advance their own cultural causes rather than a common cultural cause or identity. Charles J. Halperin, in an essay titled, The Ideology of Silence: Prejudice and Pragmatism on the Medieval Frontier (1984) contends:
For Menocal, tolerance means these hostile religious groups were able to find, through a process of “unconscious acceptance,” some “positive” or “productive” mechanism for dealing with internal and external contradictions to their belief systems and behaviors. But such “positive” outcomes, as Menocal describes them, again point to a kind of pragmatism based on “self” rather than “mutual” interest. Here is how Menocal iterates the function and products of this Andalusian “culture of tolerance:
Ironically, Maimonides’ pursuit of “the truth” led to his conclusion that genocide was an acceptable means to prevent the spread of false doctrines advocated by Muslims. Maimonides and his fellow Iberian intellectuals may have pursued and found truth “across confessional lines,” as Menocal claims, but such truths only became valid within the strictures and dogmas of their own religious ideologies.
Lastly, I should point out that slavery and color prejudice were tolerated in Moorish Spain. Brunson and Rashidi also make this point in their essay published in the “Golden Age of the Moors.”
Since this post has gone on long enough, I will use the next one to float a few dots of my own...
Concubinage and
now I'm not saying that this is an exact description of the broad American seignurial modus operandi, and I'm not saying that the American MO is completely impermeable - the generative impulse can reverse override cultural permission settings from time to time in outlier areas. however...., even there, these permissions are still set exceedingly tight.
The kernal of American haplotypic power (kinship) - on the other hand - is completely locked down and black men are completely denied access at that level of the system.
Muslim colonization of
Muslim colonization of Europe and Europe’s exposure to Islamic culture created the conditions for the acquisition and development of the ideology and technology that made European global conquest possible after the fifteenth century. The wars with Islam, religious and military, functioned as a catalyst in fostering a kind of European social consciousness and solidarity specifically organized around Manichaeanistic notions of “self” and “other.” Enrique Dussel, in his analysis of the formation of modernity, makes the following useful observation:
The European “self” in its confrontation with the non-European “other” conceived and constructed its concept of difference from the monotheistic dichotomy of believer/non-believer and the binary terms of Manichaean oppositions. The “black” presence in Iberia as Muslim conquerors and non-Muslim slaves inspired and influenced the transfer of the color code of the Manichaean allegory from the theological realm of the symbolic and abstract to the existential identity of certain human groups. The “black” color-coding of infidels and pagans and their “demonization” furnished a basis for later European scholars to speculate and conclude that the differences between Europeans and “others” were not merely ideological but innately and immutably biological.
Moses Maimonides, the influential medieval Jewish scholar—who was born in Cordova in 1135 and who later fled to Cairo to avoid persecution—wrote an important text that merged Aristotelian philosophy with Jewish theology in presenting his analysis and interpretation of Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures. The Guide for the Perplexed, a major philosophical treatise of the twelfth century, included an argument for endogamy as a barrier against idolatry (in Maimonides’ view intermarriage with non-Jews posed a threat to the strict observation of Jewish laws and traditions). In constructing his argument for “good lineage” Maimonides defended the legitimacy of Hebrew genealogy in the Torah and demonstrated how it served to establish and preserve Jewish identity and integrity. The following passages taken from an allegory he devised to demonstrate the relationship between faith and reason illustrates how the essential intellectual components of racial ideology assumed a prototypic form in the late Middle Ages. Maimonides argues that: “the extreme Turks that wander about the north, the Kushites who live in the south, and those who are like these” exemplify groups who are without religion altogether and therefore without reason. He goes on to make this critical observation: “I consider these as irrational beings, and not as human beings; they are below mankind, but above the monkeys, since they have the form and shape of man, a mental faculty above that of the monkey.” With this preamble Maimonides makes the following assertions concerning Muslims and the descendants of Ham, whom he believes hold false doctrines: “They are worse than the first class [Turks and Kushites], and under certain circumstances it may be necessary to slay them, and to extirpate their doctrines, in order that others should not be misled” The late Ivan Hannaford believed that Maimonides statement marked “the first time in Western thought people are described as beyond the bounds of rationality; they are not human. Others, rational but lacking in faith, are perceived as so dangerous to the position of the rational that their extirpation from the face of the earth is justified.”
Maimonides’ views are echoed five centuries later when Enlightenment-era European scholars, reifying the abstract notion of “rationality” as one of the distinctive traits of European character and civilization, set about the peculiar business of establishing the tenets of scientific racism. One need only consult the works of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) John Locke (1632-1704), Voltaire (1694-1778), and Montesquieu (1689-1765), among others, for salient examples of how such ideas developed and were expressed during the height of Europe’s global conquest. The following illustrative passage from the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) appeared in his essay: Of National Characters (1753):
Hume’s sentiments were grounded in ideas about “black” people that developed from medieval precursors and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In exercises in sophistry perhaps unparalleled in history, Europeans subjugated and degraded “blacks” through their systems of forced servitude and then pointed to their degradation as justification for their enslavement. Frederick Douglass, in a typically eloquent passage, exposes this discursive tactic of white supremacists that is known in today’s parlance as “blaming the victim:”
Despite its social and religious turmoil, the Iberian Peninsula was perhaps the greatest intellectual center of the late medieval world. Within its complex intellectual systems it also comprised a think tank and training ground for the invention of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the European colonial systems that administered it, and the religious and proto-racist ideology that justified and sustained it. However, as Enrique Dussel points out, the Americas involuntarily served as the geo-social laboratory where such theories took the form of practical experiments in genocide, forced migration, and forced servitude based on color. War-torn Iberia also played a decisive role in the social construction of “black” and “white” identity. James H. Sweet notes: “In Iberia, once the traits of the infidel and the slave became associated with blackness, race became the driving force in the formation of Spanish and Portuguese attitudes toward sub-Saharan Africans.”
These are a few of my dots for this discussion. They also connect back to earlier dots of yours that addressed inter-marriage. Had to cut it short. Gotta run.
One more dot ..."The kernal
One more dot ...
"The kernal of American haplotypic power (kinship) - on the other hand - is completely locked down and black men are completely denied access at that level of the system."
Is the kernal the seed or sperm, the ultimate seignurial sign, reified and codified in the one drop rule?
Looking for more dots later.
Looking for more dots later.
Is the kernal the seed or
Is our social ecology the product of evolution or intelligent design?
IMOHO - the one drop rule is one among myriad others brah..., reading the maimonides post - and feeling the cumulative effect of one megaton dot after another cause the hair to stand up on the back of my neck to an ambient mixture of x-clan samples playing in my head - I am certain that I have no ambitions predicated on the goodwill or wellbeing of either of the seignurial regimes squaring off on one another for the final go round in their centuries long battle...,
that peacock/peahen spectacle has almost nothing to do with us. I believe this leaves us free to busy ourselves with the serious Work of black cognitive activism defined strictly on our own terms.
"Is our social ecology the
"Is our social ecology the product of evolution or intelligent design?"
Evolution, no doubt. Nothing like the blind leading the blind.
But it's also ill-telligent designer fabulous. That double helix looks like the must have cosmic accessory for the big bang generation.
I did not follow this thread
I did not follow this thread during its formation but I have just gone through it and read with great interest the notes and comments posted by Ourstorian. I learned a great deal about an area where my knowledge and reading has been fairly limited. Thank you. I will have to print out your comments and make an effort to get my hands on some of the books and monographs you mentioned.
DW, read the article cnulan
DW, read the article cnulan linked. It's actually pretty mild stuff.
I thought so myself until I saw the drawing of Bennett with a noose around the neck of a black baby captioned with parallels to the holocaust.
But even then...to go further and suggest that non-black America dreams of an America where all black people have been killed, a Nazi outcome, ...
It's not that I'm particularly offended, it sounds more nutty than a sincere accusation, but I wonder why someone would suggest such things...unless they were advocating a future of isolation and alientation from "ordinary" America.
Reads to me like a complaint
Reads to me like a complaint you need to take up with Glenn Ford, the editor-in-chief of the Black Commentator. More to the point, however, and in keeping with this delightful article at the end of the current issue;
You're in for a very tough time just beyond the signpost up ahead then DW. Seems to me, and I'm generalizing from your cumulative expressions hereabouts, that you're only and exclusively capable of processing one version of logic, language, values, and history. Now, while you self-indulgently refuse to ever bring any supporting evidence to the table in support of the pov which you tirelessly champion, you do know how to link don't you? <_a href="linked url"_>linked text<_/a_>, remove the underscores and you're not deviating from that practice here, you have a pattern of reflexively sputtering that anybody who doesn't go along to get along with the dominant structured narrative is "alienated", "isolated", or "unsuccessful".
That's becoming your exclusive "oom pah pah" refrain.
Hasn't it occurred to you that the dominant structured narrative may partake in large measure of the Big Lie?
America has been systematically conditioned by white-owned media to fear, disdain, hate, and reject black men in the present moment. You're at liberty to attempt a rigorous refutation of this claim, as well. America has been conditioned by its liberal arts and sciences academies and popular press to fear, disdain, hate, and reject black men as an historical reality.
These practices are institutionalized to the point of being pervasive unwritten rules. Please feel free to explain the genesis of these rules, if you have an alternative motive you'd like to proffer?
The question for you to answer DW, and stop ducking and dodging so diligently is this;
Is our social ecology the result of evolution or ill-telligent design?
If the former, why shouldn't we work to actively debug and improve it? If the latter, why shouldn't we work to actively oppose and destroy it? What kind of mad man would I have to be to accept and endorse something so obviously illegitimate and antithetical to the interests of black men? Oh yeah, that's right, you answered that question in a previous thread, I'd have to be something along the lines of Clarence Thomas....,
you have a pattern of
you have a pattern of reflexively sputtering that anybody who doesn't go along to get along with the dominant structured narrative is "alienated", "isolated", or "unsuccessful".
I'm more than a bit of iconoclast myself cnulan; I'm not telling you to fall in line. But rejection of some or even all of the ordinary paths to success made available to all of us need not include hyperbolic claims that black people face a threat analogous to the holocaust.
What kind of mad man would I have to be to accept and endorse something so obviously illegitimate and antithetical to the interests of black men? Oh yeah, that's right, you answered that question in a previous thread, I'd have to be something along the lines of Clarence Thomas....,
I've described my black friends before cnulan. They're all successful professionals, with families and kids and mortgages just like me. Now they don't much like Clarence Thomas any more than you do. They're unhappy with the number of blacks in prison. They don't like DWB. They would agree I'm sure that racism exists today on many levels of life. They despise GW Bush. They don't like Condoleezza Rice.
But they don't much express alienation from America.
You dodged the question yet
You dodged the question yet again DW.
Is the American social ecology the result of natural selection or is it the result of ill-telligent design? If the latter, who was the intended beneficiary of the design?
There was a time in the not-too-distant past when black men had to be careful to conceal literacy, couldn't look a white man in the eye, and dared not appraise a white woman's peahen charms. I will projectively assert that you have neither a black friend or relative close enough to confide his true feelings to you. I will state matter-of-factly that a very significant percentage of black folks suppress their true feelings about the social ecology in which we're embedded. As surely as you ratiocinatively suppress coming to terms with factoids that conflict with your carefully cultivated and enobling structural narrative.
But all the above is merely psychological window dressing. My substantive critical concern about the American way of life is less rooted in its sundry overt psychopathologies, than it is my certain understanding of the thermodynamic fate awaiting America and the way that the operant psychopathologies will express themselves during the impending material crisis.
Having recently witnessed how America works in the course of and in the wake of Katrina, how do you suppose it'll work a year from now when the price of gasoline and natural gas have doubled yet again, and, the inevitable domino effect that this will exert on the supply chain becomes more clearly manifested?
"Earlier treatments of the
"Earlier treatments of the subject by Du Bois, J.A. Rogers, de-Graft Johnson, and John G. Jackson, were produced with a decidedly vindicationist agenda in mind. While their scholarship was by no means faulty or flawed, they were in the unenviable position of having to both define and defend the humanity of black people every time they put words to paper. Their intention of correcting the omissions of Western history and of setting the record straight about African cultural and intellectual achievements, while commendable and necessary, nevertheless, generally failed to situate Moorish culture within the larger context of Arabic hegemony and its promotion and expansion of color prejudice and racial slavery."
I need to retract a part of this statement as it is factually incorrect. The statement that Du Bois and the others "failed to situate Moorish culture within the larger context of Arabic hegemony and its promotion and expansion of color prejudice and racial slavery" is wrong. Du Bois and deGraft Johnson, in particular, did not overlook the problems of race prejudice and slavery within the Islamic empire. In my effort to defend their vindicationist strategies, I mis-stated the point I was trying to make.
I also should mention that I ommitted the name Jan Carew from the list of black scholars who established the intellectual foundation for Ivan van Sertima's "The Golden Age of the Moor." Carew, who is also a contributor to that collection of essays, is Van Sertima's mentor and countryman, and has been one of the leading figures in Africana studies. I highly recommend his work.
More dots..."My racial
More dots...
"My racial paranoia tells me the popular illustration of evolution is an insinuation that the white man is evolution’s final, finished, or ultimate product, while we darker-skinned peoples were just evolutionary “bumps” along the way. Either that, or we, the big-lipped, nappy-haired, well endowed, abundantly melanin-blessed (or cursed, if you’re a black neo-con), are aberrations that somehow arose after the white masterpiece was complete."
In the modern world system, History serves to make the past intelligible, tangible, meaningful and manageable. It replaces the old mythic cycles of time and the mythological mysteries of human existence with a linear conceptualization of time as a progressive and teleological force that reveals the meaning of human history through its expression and fulfillment in the emergence and domination of the West. Time is both the currency and the commodity of this ideology. It is the argument for Western superiority and its proof. Yet for all the struggles of humanity to perfect, divide and structure systems of measurement and theories of change into calendars and historical periods no one actually knows what time it is. The fundamental question of historical orientation (what time is it?) is answerable only in reference to whose time it is. Whose time is it? The Christian calendar tells us it is the year 2005. But it is 6240 according to the first Egyptian calendar, 5764 in the Jewish calendar, 2548 in the Buddhist calendar, and 1424 in the Muslim calendar. Thus historical time functions as an ideological matrix, a system of belief and faith structured and organized to maintain and preserve the cult in power and the power of the cult. Since the advent of the so-called modern world, the cult in power has been Eurocentric and its power has been white supremacy.
Like the panoramas in anthropology books that purportedly illustrate human evolution from an ape-like ancestral specimen in Africa along an unbroken line to its apotheosis as a white man in Europe, the inexorable march of History is a trick of the mind’s eye, a mirage in the desert of the real, a solipsistic self-deception similar to the optical illusion of the sun rising and setting on the earth’s horizons.
Human beings conduct their lives with this social illusion in the foreground and the material reality in the background. With the earth’s movement mistakenly perceived as the movement of the sun, we spend our days (and nights) in a state of functional incoherence convinced we are headed straight to the future while going around in circles. Functional incoherence also describes the state or condition in which modern history operates. As a totalizing scientific account of human events, History functions as a coherent statement of the incoherence of the human experience in time. It posits Europe as the nexus where history begins and ends (the horizons where the sun rises and sets), and thus makes time the servant of European ideology and socio-economic power. It convenes its narratives—which do not conform to reality but to what reality is imagined to be or projected to be—using pseudo-scientific arguments steeped in the rhetoric of rationality and reason to simulate verisimilitude and universality. In this sense, History is a ruse instantiated and ratified in the imaginary of the West to establish and maintain the West’s epistemological dominance over the rest of us. As a hegemonic project of colonialism, its nature and function is to assimilate and integrate all local particularities and temporalities into the pseudo-universality of the modern world system. By conceiving and convening the past in its own image (the European imaginary) the past then becomes the representative means whereby the Euro-American polity controls the present and shapes the future.
Human beings conduct their
Though I reached back to establish an alternative reference frame in which the present terror of the situation can be considered, I would be remiss to leave off the theme at this deep juncture. Beyond the background seignurial bias of originalistic just-so-storytelling - our logic, language, and values are now conditioned by the foreground immersive power of mass media that the propagandists could have only ever fantasized about.
After classes at the learning center yesterday, I fell in with some of the elders who were talking about Bennett. In the light of where this thread left off one of them stated quite correctly that no matter how great the plague of cutting and shooting on saturday night in the hood, it's small potatos as against the major crimes perpetrated in broad daylight by this country. Nothing done in the aggregate by blacks over a twenty year span equates with the whole country jack move perpetrated by the present administration.
There is a sinister genius at work in the process that demonizes and focuses on petty individual criminality while enobling and legitimating wholesale, genocidal, corporate criminality. That is the special genius of the American seignurial MO. Mass media is the leading evolutionary edge of the audacious machinery of the Big Lie - which is the very embodiment and essence of how this do one thing and say another system works.
Evolution, or ill-telligent design?
There is a sinister genius
There is a sinister genius at work in the process that demonizes and focuses on petty individual criminality while enobling and legitimating wholesale, genocidal, corporate criminality.
Well cnulan there's two non-petty issues in the drug distribution problem.
1. Murder. As in young black men murdering a variety of mostly black people in an effort to protect their income.
2. The conveyor belt from jr. high to prison for young black men. The understanding that there's plenty of money to be made without knowing fractions.
I don't believe the solution here is to trivialize and point off to the side. Legalizing drugs may well be a real solution, but lacking political support, an alternative would be useful.
but lacking political
and it is this lack that is precisely the rub. nowhere ever have I seen a rational, econometric justification of the historical U.S. drug prohibition and the amplified contemporary War on Black Men
As a matter of fact, the entire history of the U.S. drug prohibition is so tightly bound up in racism and xenophobia as to point toward a fundamental and intractable barrier to logical entry. It's an absolute interrupt in the logical structure of American governance policy that undermines any conceivable apologetic you could advance in that cause DW.
Nothing less than the integrity of the American system is at stake here. There are no acceptable alternatives to legislative correction of this grotesque, racist, and irrational domestic war on black men. every other possible claim presented by the American system is rendered moot by this highly damaging vestige of jim crow which clearly discloses the seignurial nature of the American social ecology.
I don't believe the solution
I agree, so let's address the primary problem space;
Blacks own no poppy or coca fields.
Blacks own none of the ships, planes, and tractor trailers that support the wholesale importation and distribution.
Blacks own and control none of the banks that launder the massive coin and currency flows arising from narcotics trade.
Blacks own and control none of the media which glorifies and propagandizes the narcotraficante lifestyle.
Blacks are not the primary consumers of the contraband materials.
Blacks control none of the legislative power required to eliminate these jim crow laws.
Blacks control none of the laws required to control gun proliferation and we all know where the overwhelming majority of crime guns come from.
Blacks manufacture no guns or bullets.
Which aspect of white America's racist socio-ecological assault on young black men and the well-being of the community which depends on the seignurial viability of young black men would you like to take on first DW?
Which aspect of white
Which aspect of white America's racist socio-ecological assault on young black men and the well-being of the community which depends on the seignurial viability of young black men would you like to take on first DW?
Call it hegemony. Call it a racist plot. Call it reality.
When you point off to the side, you're part of the problem, not part of the solution.
White people might have set up the trap of easy drug money, but black people take the bait with their eyes wide open.
So what did white people
So what did white people gain by setting up the trap? And what level of responsibility for the resulting problem do the have as the creators of the trap?
cnulan isn't pointing to the side, he's pointing to the center. It only looks like the side if you think we should be going in circles.
So what did white people
So what did white people gain by setting up the trap?
What did white people gain by prohibition? They were following a belief that making something criminal would make it go away, and what they got was a funding mechanism for criminal organizations. It sems a recurring bad idea.
And what level of responsibility for the resulting problem do the have as the creators of the trap?
Pretty much the same resonsibility those who would take guns away from law abiding people would face when the compliant were victimized by criminals.
cnulan isn't pointing to the side, he's pointing to the heart.
When there's a trap, and you'r watching people take the bait, pointing anywhere but the trap is not useful in reducing the inflow into the trap. It's a distraction. It lessens the will and the information to avoid.
White people might have set
might have?
Stop struggling...,
The American system has so many stress fractures - now fully evident - that it's only a matter of time before it buckles under its own inconsistencies.
All the kings men with all the tools in the world at their disposal can't even manage to keep the story straight any longer DW.
I believe in the indomitable integrity of blackness. I trust the common sense of black folks and I lend my highest and best efforts toward the furtherence of the same.
As for the devolutionary and blind-alley'd endogamous American way of life,
MENE–MENE–TEKEL–UPARSIN
This is the interpretation of the thing:
MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and brought it to an end.
Dan. 5:25-26
And what level of
That would be pretty much absolute, right?
Aren't white people being trapped in depending on these incorrect expectations? How are you helping white people out of that? Aren't you coming up short by not working to discredit this recurring bad idea?
"There is a sinister genius
"There is a sinister genius at work in the process that demonizes and focuses on petty individual criminality while enobling and legitimating wholesale, genocidal, corporate criminality. That is the special genius of the American seignurial MO. Mass media is the leading evolutionary edge of the audacious machinery of the Big Lie - which is the very embodiment and essence of how this do one thing and say another system works."
Absolutely.
One of the network news programs (ABC or NBC, I don't remember which) did a story on folks scamming the government for Katrina funds. The story began with footage depicting a black woman being taken into custody and handcuffed by white cops for collecting money that was supposed to aid the victims of Katrina. I believe several thousand dollars had been fraudulently collected. As the story continued, attention was given to a website that had managed to scam folks out of more than 40k in a matter of a few days or so by claiming they were airlifting sick children from Louisiana to various hospitals around the south. Of course there was no such program and no air service, it was a bogus website. Footage showed the website, but nothng was said about the perpetrators or any arrests. The news story then ended by returning to footage of the unidentified black women under arrest and waiting to be transported to jail.
This happens in the media everyday. The face of crime in America is black by design.
"Nothing done in the
"Nothing done in the aggregate by blacks over a twenty year span equates with the whole country jack move perpetrated by the present administration."
If Americans actually believed their own rhetoric about justice and human rights, Bush and his cronies would be locked up in Guantanamo awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. Nothing done in the aggregate by black folks since our ancestors first arrived on these shores can compare with the crimes of the current administration.
"There are no acceptable
"There are no acceptable alternatives to legislative correction of this grotesque, racist, and irrational domestic war on black men. every other possible claim presented by the American system is rendered moot by this highly damaging vestige of jim crow which clearly discloses the seignurial nature of the American social ecology."
The jim crow application of drug laws makes them highly useful and lucrative tools for maintaining the status quo of white supremacy. Not only do they serve as pretexts for the mad dog policing of black communities, they also provide a vital revenue stream for cops, judges, lawyers, and the contractors who build and maintain the prison industrial complex. Even the phone companies have climbed on board, charging usurious rates for long distance calls from prisons, rates prisoners and their families can ill-afford. This operates in concert with the practice of housing black inmates in rural prisons where they provide jobs and incomes for white folks and contribute to the census data used to calculate and apportion Congressional representation. Thus black and Latino felons, who have been excised from voter roles, form a critical segment in the population of these rural voting districts. This practice in some ways mimics the clause established in the U.S. Constitution authorizing the use of the formula that a black slave constituted 3/5 of a human being for the purpose of determining proportional representation in slave-holding states. As you can imagine, many of the "representatives" from these voting districts go to Washington and vote against the interests of black folks in general, and for the continuation of the policies that foster and maintain the ghetto-prison pipeline. Their jobs depend on it.
The American system has so
The American system has so many stress fractures - now fully evident - that it's only a matter of time before it buckles under its own inconsistencies.
Remember James Watt? The guy who said it doesn't much matter if we conserve because the second coming of Christ is imminent?
Would you be a latter day James Watt, cnulan? Telling young black men that it's ok if they end up in prison, because things are going to buckle any day now. That maybe it's their civic duty as black men do do some time as a way to bring the
second comingcollapse of America sooner?That kind of thinking--it ain't me it's white people--but massive forces are about to set things straight--is a significant factor in the bad judgement which is resulting in massive incarceration of black males. It means they don't need to learn fractions, rather they can be out their raking in the dough and having way more money than the kids in school. There might be doom ahead, but hey, I'm doomed anyway unless and until those forces of God arrive.
That's your weakest argument
That's your weakest argument yet. Not just the usual correlation vs causation issues but temporal dyslexia as well.
Would you be a latter day
Stop struggling DW.
We're all looking at all the cards you've ever held in your hand. What you call common sense, or originalism, or even reality, no longer possesses any of the mimetic stealth qualities that formerly made it slippery or difficult to discern. You're busted brotha.
"Hail, hail, fire and snow, call the angel we will go, far away, for to see, friendly angel come to me".
Seems to me the imperative is for each one to teach one about the nature of Gorgan such that not a moment longer is wasted in fundamentally futile repartee.
Recent example of
Recent example of ill-telligent social engineering that occurred in parallel and possibly even in response to the dilution of black social ecology;
Now, my kingdom for a powerful and rigorous exegesis of blaxploitation cinema and the way in which ill-telligent engineering of the American social ecology has been impacted by Hollywood and the six-o-clock evening news....,
Novick's contention is that
The horrors of the holocaust were first presented to Americans as photographs of the concentration camps which were taken coincident with the fall of the Nazis during the spring of 1945. Within a year or so it had become clear what the Nazis had done. People may well have been numbed by the atomic bomb, but the horror was well established in the American common experience by 1947. As a kid during the late '50s, not even knowing any Jews as Jews, I sure knew about it, and knew why it was important.
Novick is a revisionst.
Baldwin's point (quoted 3rd hand and interpreted here..) that there exist certain parallels between Jews, historically, and blacks in America is reasonable, including the fact that no one's likely to "rescue" American blacks. Presumably, he's arguing that American blacks need to effect their own solution, and that's reasonable too.
Novick is a
That's what you said about 1491 too.
Here's the thing DW, those mindfilters through which you reprocess every iota of data presented hereabouts not only make you an exemplary revisionist, they make you a solipsistic revisionist in near-real-time, as well.
The minute we become collectively introspective in significant numbers, pragmatically turning our backs on what you term success methinkst you'll have a very hard time coming to terms with the afrofuturist re-engineering of reality. We're doing our level best to help you, but your obstinacy is getting in the way of your growth possibilities. Spence did a nice job of summarizing the problem inhering to your self-limiting point of view...,
Here's the thing cnunan.If
Here's the thing cnunan.
If you're going to overturn established common understanding, you have to present overwhelming evidence. There's no shortage of cranks who try to make a living or an ego presenting plausible alternative scenarios, aimed at an audience who is motivated to believe. Regular people are well defended against such cranks. That raises the bar for those who would change common understanding, but it means that when they do so, they tend to achieve the change quickly and decisevely, because their evidence is in fact overwhelming.
Here's the actual thing
Here's the actual thing DW
You've somehow managed to conflate legislating and discussing. You presume that I care to overturn "common understanding". I don't. All I care to do is to objectively inform those capable of processing data objectively. Verification is all that is essential, not consensus. A partial consensus of American "common understanding" voted the present administration into office and is now regretting ever having done so.
You, for your part, bring scant little evidence to any of these discursive proceedings and audaciously presume that I or anyone else shares your "common understanding". You're not defended against cranks DW, you're simply obstinate in your refusal to consider information that doesn't fit your common understanding. Stop getting it twisted. We're discussing, not legislating, and you have here-to-date brought no evidence in support of your position to the discussion.
"Recent example of
"Recent example of ill-telligent social engineering that occurred in parallel and possibly even in response to the dilution of black social ecology;"
How did the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum get built on the Mall in Washington, DC (it opened in 1993) before the National Museum of the American Indian (opened in 2004) and a National Museum for African Americans?
While I understand the mission of the Holocaust Museum, I don't believe it should have been located on the Mall. Many Jewish Americans were victims of the Holocaust, but, aside from America's belated response to it, a response actually predicated by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust itself is not a part of American history.
On the other hand, the holocausts perpetrated against Native peoples in America and against African peoples transported to America, constitute the very marrow of this nation's body politic. Yet, as always is the case, they are afterthoughts in the nation's historical memory.
This afternoon at the
This afternoon at the learning center, I was making dynebolic discs for the boys and listening to the elders talk about pan-africanism over the backdrop of the MMM. {i'm testing an ubuntu partition on one of my machines, and after I beat on it a while, I might possibly be tempted to shift or at the very least broaden my loyalties}
A wealthy Yoruba visitor was present during this discussion. I stayed out of it for the most part, as I was busy, and frankly more interested in hearing what my elders had to say. I casually kept my eye on our Nigerian brother though, watching his body language as the elders talked among themselves about the MMM and in process of trying to engage him in their discussion, called him an Ibo - {he visibly cringed in response to this sleight}.
To make the long story short, I couldn't resist jumping into the fray as it centered on the concept of unity, and so I put the brother rather intensely on the spot by asking him about kinship structures among the Yoruba. I asked him why, if pan-africanism seems such like such a capital idea among American black folk, who are now by default among the most exogamous people on the face of the earth, why hasn't it ever taken hold in say for example, Nigeria? Suffice it to say, the brother was at such a loss for words that he suddenly had to pack up his gear and get out of dodge.
Funny how people can be when you question their cultural and political views about open source genomics....,
just as i said on the other
just as i said on the other post - privilege allows liars to lie and otherwise...in reading the above, it's truly compelling to hear dw's CLARITY and AWARENESS in observing the aftermath of Nazi activity - based on photographs observed during youth...i wonder how many pictures have been ignored over the past FIVE DECADES that he is now so vague about how privilege is a part of his life...
i love blogs...you can run, but you can't hide. i done with that cat. jensen did neglect to mention the psychological games that white folks must play in order to justify their material and ideological existence. what fun.
.i wonder how many pictures
.i wonder how many pictures have been ignored over the past FIVE DECADES that he is now so vague about how privilege is a part of his life...
A couple of experiences over the past couple of days T3.
1. I read some Langston Hughes. I concluded it was the kind of thing I should be reading to my grandkids.
2. I encountered a collection of people who decline to grasp the difference in experience between being white and being black in America.
It ain't me, but we need a white Langston Hughes in this picture.
"Presumably, he's arguing
"Presumably, he's arguing that American blacks need to effect their own solution, and that's reasonable too."
Then why are you and other whites so deeply resistent to the prescriptions that we offer to address our problems? Oh! I get it. You want to see solutions that DO NOT entail any social, financial or political costs for yourselves.
Then why are you and other
Then why are you and other whites so deeply resistent to the prescriptions that we offer to address our problems?
I'm sure we could identify some of those prescriptions which I and maybe other whites wouldn't resist at all, PT.
The resisted ones seem to fall into one of two categories:
1. More of the same which hasn't worked before
2. Racial preference enforced by law
You want to see solutions that DO NOT entail any social, financial or political costs for yourselves.
Lots of money, time, and effort have gone down the drain. Lots of money, tjme, and effort remain available, but there's an unwillingness to pour good money after bad.
There are "prescriptions" which seem to be working. I caught a PBS thing about public schools in N. Carolina which was very promising, particularly in the worst of schools. When the technique was attempted in San Diego, it was killed off by the teacher's union. I'm willing to suggest that if we were to double the salary of every teacher in San Diego, and double all non-salary budgets, that the perrformance of the worst schools in San Diego would not improve at all. On the other hand, if we figure out what works, and it involves demanding that teachers actually teach the curriculum rather than substituting their own judgement (a key aspect of the N. Carolina and one NYC district's solution) then scores rise as if by miricle. (the other key aspect was very frequent testing to see if the kids had actually learned the curriculum)
So I think there do exist important prescriptions for which time and money are available.
Given that we know it's doable, why not demand that failing schools be improved? Why not march on such schools to draw attention to the demand? You won't find any opposition from white people, PT, except those in teacher's unions.
"More of the same which
"More of the same which hasn't worked before..."
Well, then let's try some new things like adequately funding public schools; providing affordable childcare for single parents trying to get off the dole and investing in small scale and sustainable retail economic enterprises in poor communities instead of massive redevelopment projects that tend only to benefit people who don't live in the affected areas.
"More of the same which
WHITE PEOPLE TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR PART OF THE MESS????
There's something new...
"WHITE PEOPLE TAKING
"WHITE PEOPLE TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR PART OF THE MESS????"
Too hard! So is adequately funding our public schools because too many white folks have bought into the neo-liberal and neo-conservative absurdity that spending more money won't help inner-city public schools. Spending more money does absolute wonders for public schools located in suburban areas however as my wife and I and nearly all of our neighbors, including those who don't believe that inner-city public schools need more funding, will readily and willingly attest to.
dangerous to simply throw
dangerous to simply throw out the notion of social policy failures without a related empirical analysis of efficiency and effectiveness. underfunding, short-term support and election year politicking have always complicated these factors.
dw is right about the complicity of teachers unions (and by implication, the DEMOCRATIC party) in undermining the academic achievement of students. still, for two dynamic collectives to reach an agreement on this level, reason will not be the operative lever. it never has been and never will be. given that africans have shed blood for just about every "right" that americans enjoy - beyond those related to demands of the tax-weary children of england, america has little hope BEYOND more black folk dying in pursuit of some lofty goal. the next best option would be for white women and children to offer up their bodies in the cause. if it bleeds it leads. time for someone else to play christ-figure. it seems to be the only thing the collective understands.
and since soccer moms ain't givin' it up for nobody, the gap shall not be closed beyond prescriptions intended to make soccer moms feel safe. so, while the daughters of the soccer moms feel safe enough to get with snoop and flash for cash (and more, I'm told), the generation gap is difficult. perhaps america can age it's way out of this problem - led by the loose morals and profligate degeneracy of young white women. think mary magdalene and the internet...think redemption and liberation.
that's a relatively bloodless proposition to the historical alternative. teachers gone wild, $19.99 - infomercials with testimonials from bay buchanan and the like.
the question of whether
the question of whether "inner-city schools" (i assume you don't mean the prestigious prep schools in which the urban 'elite' are educated - but rather schools with poor black and/or latino children...hate euphemisms) require additional funding is complex.
for example, it is difficult to argue that teacher salaries should be increased by as much as 33% (as they have in NYC over the past few years) unless the city can ensure the best teachers are in the lowest performing schools (a recently won component of NYC's negotiations). this is rare across the nation. the youngest, most inexperienced teachers learn the craft in "inner-city" schools (ha, ha) and then bounce once their skills improve and they've strengthened their negotiating position. it's a triage system that is sustained, dw, generally by the daughters (and a few sons) of white america. it's an interesting dynamic. but the bottom line is that scores don't move because the number one indicator of student success is TEACHER QUALITY. unions and democrats have moved in LOCK STEP to ensure that these unassailable rights are not assailed. in NYC, it's a good thing that bloomberg switched party's.
even with these issues on the table, disparities in per pupil allocations between city and suburb can be as great as $10,000 per child. when you spend $10,000 more per child, per year (with more experienced teachers - using better resources) the test scores should be better in the burbs. they should be significantly better. none of this is rocket science. so, unions need to make concessions. parents need to be more involved, but pundits and analysts should not proffer disingenuous arguments about the implications of vastly divergent funding for schools. a successful student attending a school where per pupil expenditures (ppe's) are between $8000 and $12000 (typically with teachers with 0-3 years experience) must be commended because he/she will eventually compete with students where ppe's are as high as $21,000 (and where 90-100% of teachers have master's degrees, undergraduate degrees in the subject they're teaching, and 5-10+ years of experience). in this context, notions of an achievement gap are pretty comical. so, these issues deserve a broader platform than this medium tends to support.
but the bottom line is that
but the bottom line is that scores don't move because the number one indicator of student success is TEACHER QUALITY.
I'm sure not going to argue that teacher quality isn't an important factor. What I have observed however is that failing schools are in a rut which is too deep to get out of by simple improvement of teacher quality.
The N. Carolina and NYC success story did not involve changing teachers, it involved changing teaching.
The rut I observed, and the evidence seems clear that my direct observations generalize fairly well, is the rut of low expectations. A majority of the students arrived at school with no intent of participating in education, they arrived for entertainment. The teachers went along; if the students should master fractions in the 6th grade, but in the entire class none of them could, the teacher lowered expectations. If by chance a teacher maintained expecations, that was quashed by administration, who stood by parents who demanded to know why students were't receiving passing grades, suggesting that the teacher was failing rather than the students. A rut. A deep, failing rut. More money into such a rut means more entrenchment of those on the receiving end.
In California, it is already the case that these failing schools receive more money than the best schools in the state. All schools are constitutionally funded equally by default, with supplemental money going to address problems rather than to reward success.
I'll repeat: white people in particular and society in general are more than willing to fund better education for those mostly black children who currently expreience failing schools. What we don't want and aren't willing to fund is twice as much of the same.
No doubt there's more than one way out of the rut. The N. Carolina and NYC successes I described earlier are one. If there's more, let's try them.
Summary:1. Far better
Summary:
1. Far better schooling is available for kids now attending failing schools.
2. Nothing is going to change without demand from regular people with kids in those schools.
3. The demand cannot be abstract. The demand has to be precisely stated as "far better results".
4. We all need to understand that a successful school will be operated considerably differently than the currently failing schools.
5. Imagine sending your kid off to school with "the reason you're failing in school son is because white people are failing to accept responsibility". I considered the potential that some local posters might actually do such a thing, but concluded that I knew them better than that.
5. Imagine sending your kid
Straw man.
And you were doing so well.
Let's skip all of this
Let's skip all of this irrelevant folderol that you always manage to inject into these kind of discussions. Let's put aside the issue of teachers' compensation, which is obviously of great concern to teachers and their dependents and creditors and protectors of the public treasury like yourself, but not uppermost in the minds of people who have to send their children to these miserable dwellings that masquerade as places devoted to educating and enlightening children about the world.
Let's begin with the physical plants themselves. These decaying, decrepit, aging and dying structures have long outlived their alleged usefulness as schools if, in fact, they ever served such a purpose for the greater part of the young people sentenced to these facilities for seven hours a day, five days a week for thirteen years. The costs to maintain these buildings, power them up, keep them clean and refurbish them cannot be justified on any reasonable grounds.
Every urban area in America has abandoned or underutilized buildings that can with minimum costs be turned into schools that would serve 100 to 250 students. These buildings would be cheaper to maintain, heat, illuminate, clean and repair. There would be no need for full time janitors, cafeteria workers and the entire menagerie of service personnel that are nearly always required when you stuff several thousand young, active and curious young people into a large building and shut the doors. With a reduced number of students there would be a corresponding reduction in the number of educational managers needed to oversee the facility, e.g., principals, vice-principals, head counselors, student services advisors, P.E. teachers etc.
The resultant savings in costs could be used to increase and improve the school district's course offerings including reinvigorating the arts, science, language and music programs. The surplus school properties could be leased on a long term basis to non-profit and for profit housing developers to convert these existing structures into affordable housing with a mixture of small and appropriate retail shops that cater to the development's residents and members of the surrounding community. A percentage of these new housing units could be set aside for young teachers who more often than not cannot afford to pay for decent market rate housing within the boundaries of the school district that employs them.
The school district would agree to forego any direct lease payments for the use of the land and demand instead that the funds be used to create a neighborhood improvement district. The improvement district's chief purpose would be to facilitate the kinds of neighborhood amenities that would attract a diverse mix of people from differing income groups. In other words, the school district would be actively promoting policies creating greater economic integration in poorer urban neighborhoods.
The smaller schools would be much better suited to offering an environment that is conducive to educating young people. A smaller school, for example, would provide a more relaxed and secure atmosphere for children to feel safe and secure. Children with special needs or who are at greater risk than their classmates can be more easily identified and provided with the support they need.
If over time the school's enrollment increased to a point that the existing facility became too small then the district could find another building or add to the existing building without incurring the huge capital costs, often unwritten by issuing and selling bonds, that serve to financially cripple many urban school districts today. The Los Angeles Unified School District (this is a contradiction in terms) recently spent in excess of $38 million to build a new high school before discovering that the new plant was built over a toxic dump that itself was constructed over an earthquake fault. The school will never be occupied but the bondholders will still have to be paid off.
The wrangling between liberals and conservatives over urban public education in the United States has devolved into little more than a pissing match with parents and, more importantly, students being held hostage to one bullshit crank theory or jive-ass political agenda after another. What is needed here is a reimagining of the purpose of public schools and a willingness to take small scale practical risks in order to create a better school system.
I forgot to say that high
I forgot to say that high school SPORTS as we have come know it in urban school districts would wither away too under my plan, but there is no reason why the existing gymnasiums, track fields etc. cannot be turned over to local YMCAs or similar institutions in the area with the provision that these institutions assume responsibility for running basketball leagues and soccer teams etc.
The wrangling between
The wrangling between liberals and conservatives over urban public education in the United States has devolved into little more than a pissing match with parents and, more importantly, students being held hostage to one bullshit crank theory or jive-ass political agenda after another.
I agree with this completely PT. There's no shortage of cranks.
On the other hand, we need a way to:
And, of course 5. Imagine
And, of course
What was that particular line of bullshit supposed to accomplish?